


Interrogatives?—Season 3

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Interrogatives? [3]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Estrangement, F/M, Family, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:29:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 22,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29305020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: So. Yeah. I completely broke up with the show and then . . . pandemic? And the worst semester of my life? And general world on fire? In any case, I watched through the series again and did a story per episode, just as I did with Dialogic, and then with Object Lessons. So each chapter is an independent, episode-based story. It will take me a while to get these posted, but there are another 151 stories and I'll divvy them up by season.
Relationships: Javier Esposito/Lanie Parish, Jenny O'Malley Ryan/Kevin Ryan, Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Josh Davidson, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle, Richard Castle/Gina Cowell
Series: Interrogatives? [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096184
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	1. Single Camera—A Deadly Affair (3 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She can’t stay mad at him. It’s a pathetic cliché. It’s the pat, unbelievable wrap-up to a half-hour sitcom. But it also happens to be the truth. She cannot, it seems, stay mad at him. 

> _“You’re not very good at this, are you?”_   
>  _— Alexis Castle, A Deadly Affair (3 x 01)_
> 
> * * *

She can’t stay mad at him. It’s a pathetic cliché. It’s the pat, unbelievable wrap-up to a half-hour sitcom. But it also happens to be the truth. She cannot, it seems, stay mad at him. 

It really doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a problem at first. After she gets over the first shock of seeing him standing over a body with a gun in his hand, it really does not seem as though staying angry with him until she draws her last breath is going to be a problem, because he is every bit as infuriating now as he was the first time she hauled his ass into an interrogation room. 

She’d like to grab him by his stupid, striped shirt and hurl him right through the one-way mirror and into the observation room when he has the actual balls to tell he, in his talk-show seduction voice, that she looks good. She wants him to suffer a dire but unavoidable injury to a delicate body part with a ballpoint pen when he snaps at her that she knows he’s in a relationship, she knows with whom. 

Her anger is going great guns. She thinks she might just survive this, but Demming inevitably comes up, and her fury fails her for a fraction of a second. Loss rushes to the forefront with embarrassment—no, _humiliation_ —a close second. A summer of stupidly missing him, thanks to her tragic, miserable timing wells up, and he sees the weak spot in her armor. He sees all, knows all in one skipped beat of her heart. 

“You broke up.” 

He blinks hard as he says it. He swallows, and she watches as his stupid persona fails him for the first time since she clicked the cuffs closed. She feels a surge of fierce, bitter satisfaction that drains away immediately. _You broke up._ That’s the moment that it starts to fall apart. They stare at each other for a desperate, nakedly honest instant—two absolute _fools._

She sees sympathy flash behind his eyes. She sees that he’s sorry for her sake—that he would never wish pain of any kind on her—but he is not at all sorry that Demming is no more. She sees behind his eyes an absolute picture show of feelings he has no business entertaining, because he’s in a relationship and she knows with whom. 

The desperate instant passes. She remembers that she has a case to work, that _s_ he has every reason to lean on him hard. She has absolute license to unleash her anger, and she reaches once again for what had seemed like an endless supply of it just a few moments ago. She manages a reasonable facsimile right up to the moment that Montgomery knocks and she shouldn’t need it anymore. She shouldn’t need anything, because he is free to go. 

But he _won’t_ go. Of course he won’t. She whirls to face him, to roar at him to get out of her sight. Instead, she has to fight back sudden, insistent tears for all the world to see as she runs through her litany of things he should go back to, and anger is no longer running the show. 

She can’t stay mad at him. It’s no sitcom resolution, and then it kind of is. 

There’s another crime scene and another absurd encounter with hands up and guns drawn. She produces her cuffs for the second time that day, but it’s Three Stooges rules now. She’s twisting his ear, he’s nattering on about the universe. She is relenting and he is weaseling his way back into her life. 

She is alarmed by this. She is fucking _alarmed,_ even as they fall immediately into their old rhythm. A coffee lands on her desk, and the smile that creeps across her face is an unfamiliar feeling. He pitches CIA operatives, because he _always_ pitches CIA something or other, and she replies with something withering, and there really should e someone to cue up the laugh track. 

She rolls her eyes and hides more than one wide smile in her sleeve at the way the boys have deputized themselves to keep the weasel problem at bay. She thinks in those terms—in tortured ridiculous metaphor—because that’s how her mind bubbles along when he is in the mix, and she’s missed this. She has missed the anarchy that is him—the productive non sequiturs and the leaps of insight. She has missed trading barbs and sideways smiles. 

The bet turns out to be the climax of their half hour sitcom. The bet is where everyone learns an important life lesson. She proposes the bet, she makes the bet, she throws the bet, and the lesson learned? She can’t stay mad at him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Misplaced rage an what is no doubt a million typos . .. not. a thing. 


	2. For Remembrance—He's Dead, She's Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It isn’t especially late. A look out the window at the still-purpling sky assures him of that. The serpentine flow of traffic—the tail end of Manhattan’s endless rush hour—says the sky’s math checks out: It is not one million o’clock, it just feels like it. 

> _“She was helping you get closure?”  
>  — Richard Castle, He’s Dead, She’s Dead (3 x 02)_

* * *

It isn’t especially late. A look out the window at the still-purpling sky assures him of that. The serpentine flow of traffic—the tail end of Manhattan’s endless rush hour—says the sky’s math checks out: It is not one million o’clock, it just feels like it. 

He’s not exactly sure _why_ it feels like it. For him, the heavy lifting came more than a day ago as he worked to channel his mother’s heartbroken, careening thoughts into a fitting eulogy. Today, his role had been limited to taking the handoff of an endless stream of appetizer plates from which his mother ate nothing, and doling out about as many subdued smiles, each accompanied by a nice-to-meet-you nod, to people he will never see again. 

But whatever the sky says, whatever he has or hasn’t had to weather today, it feels like it’s one-million o’clock. His French cuffs have him absolutely stymied, and he’s seriously considering face planting on the bed, somber suit and all, when there’s a timid knock on the door. 

He reverses course and crosses the room with a blank, tired mind. Having literally no expectation as he tugs open the door, he’s still gobsmacked to find her awkwardly clutching a greeting card envelope in one hand and balancing some kind of floral arrangement/potted plant on the upturned palm of the other. 

“Beckett,” he says dumbly. She looks as startled as he is dead certain he does. She looks as though she might have been turning tail to run even as the door opened. 

“It’s late. I should have called,” she blurts, even though it isn’t. He glances over his shoulder at the still-purpling sky, and it is still stubbornly not late. “I’m sorry, I was just going to leave these.” She thrusts both hands out awkwardly toward him. “At the door. I shouldn’t have knocked. For Martha.” 

“She’s upstairs.” He glances in that direction. They look each other, confused. Finally, he shakes himself. He takes the envelope from her, though he can’t quite manage the transfer of the potted thing one-handed without it toppling to the floor, and she is frozen. She is not forthcoming with solutions. “Do you want to come in?” 

“No,” she says immediately—forcefully—though she looks sorry for it right away. Not just embarrassed, but genuinely sorry for it. “I wouldn’t want to intrude.” 

“You’re not intruding.” He makes a blind reach and sets the envelope on the base of the sculpture by the door. He holds out both hands to take the plant from her. “You wouldn’t be.” 

She doesn’t relinquish her burden right away. There’s half a second where they’re both holding on to it. He’s reminded, for no reason other than his almost paranormal ability to annoy her, of shooting the Ouija board’s planchette across the board to tell his mother that, _yes,_ Chet forgives her. A smile stuck in subdued mode flicks across his face. 

“What?” she asks, a hint of suspicion in her voice. 

“Nothing.” He shakes his head—no _nice-to-meet-you_ nod necessary. “I think my mother is down for the count.” He’s not sure why he admits that. He wants her to come in and he thinks it hurts his chances. But it feels like cheating not to say so. “You wouldn’t be intruding, though.” 

He tugs a little harder at the plant, a counterbalance for his honesty. He sees the angle of her jaw change, and he thinks he’s blown it. He’s sure she’ll go, but she surprises him a second time. She relinquishes her hold and steps through the door. 

“Can I get you something?” He studies the plant closely to hide his consternation. It’s something hearty and green in the center—something that will survive after the blazing orange and warm gold flowers surrounding it have wilted. She really has surprised him a second time, and he still feels like it’s one million o’clock. 

He crosses toward the kitchen as the most likely place to set the thing down and do any care and feeding it might need. There’s a long pause. He turns and half expects her to still be clinging to the door frame, but she’s right behind him, the envelope she plucked from the sculpture base pressed to the buttons of her coat with his mother’s name in her confident handwriting facing outward. 

“Tea?” she says, chewing the corner of her lip as though it’s a particularly tough SAT question. 

“Tea,” he agrees and sets about the stage business of that. 

She installs herself on a stool at the counter. She unbuttons her coat, but leaves it on. He kicks himself for not thinking to take it from her at the door—for not thinking of helping her with it. He watches her out of the corner of his eye as he crosses to the sink and back. He thinks ruefully that it’s nice to have company in this awkward liminal state at what feels like one-million o’clock. 

“Was it … bad?” She approaches the question tentatively, like someone who knows it’s their serve in the small-talk match and they’re dreading the prospect. It’s her turn to shake her head. “Those things are always bad.” 

He clicks on the burner, using the motion to hide a pang of kicking-himself sympathy: Those things _are_ always terrible, and she would certainly know. 

“It was tiring,” he says. He’s caught between wanting to let the weight of the day just show and not wanting to burden her. He pulls down mugs. He pulls down a rainbow array of boxes of tea and sets them out between them. He looks up. “Nothing happens at them—absolutely nothing. How are they so tiring?” 

It’s mostly rhetorical. It’s mostly _Dead people, what’s up with them, amirite?_ observational comedy that makes him inwardly cringue. He’s not expecting an answer. But she surprises him a third time. 

“It’s lonely.” She reaches for the handle of a mug and spins it on its base. “There’s all those people and you smile and you shake hands and you say thank you, but they don’t want to be there.” She covers the top of the mug with one palm. She spreads her fingers and peers downward as though the secrets of the universe can be found between them. “No one wants to catch what you have. No one really wants to be around you. It’s lonely,” she says again. She pushes the mug away from her. She reaches to just touch the corner of the envelope. “That’s why I came.” 

The drumroll sound of water just off the boil snaps her out of her brief reverie. She shakes herself, looking a little embarrassed. 

“It’s just a card.” She sounds almost defensive, and well she might: It’s not just a card. She scowls at the plant as though she’s one second from shoving it over the edge of the counter. “The obituary said no flowers, and I sent a donation—“ She draws herself up, suddenly defiant. “I liked the colors.”

“The colors—“ He has to pause to swallow past a lump in his throat. “The colors are beautiful.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: So long and so empty of things. 


	3. Faster, Faster—Under the Gun (3 x 03)

> _“All that was just an act?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, Under the Gun (3 x 03)_

* * *

She never wanted a pony, not for one instant. Her past is devoid of childish crayon drawings of fat bodies on uncertain legs, mane and tail streaming out behind to suggest speed and rushing wind to chase. 

And she never wanted to be a princess, though she learned to fake that one at some point. She’d learned the hard way that the lack of fascination with veiled hats shaped like a traffic cone, a dearth of fantasies of being rescued, and no hard-line preference for pink its infinite shades were all liabilities, so after a lonely second grade year, she’d learned to play at it. 

She’d sketched her share of turrets with lonely windows. She’d been good at actual horses, less so with the knights meant to ride them. She’d played the game until the boy–girl lines that diverged early wended their way back toward one another. 

She was never quite a tom boy, She was definitely never a girly girl, even when she _was_ faking it. And as awkward as the pre-teen years were, for her as much as anyone, they were a relief, too. _I like him—that one_ , she could point and say when what she really liked was his moves on a skateboard, his way with a banged-up bike, his obsession with NASA and all his cool toys. _I like that one._

She was never a popular girl, either. Somehow, she wasn’t, even though she was … sought after. All the right guys thought she was cute, thought she was cool, thought she might be fun to hang out with. 

And she _was_ fun to hang out with. Whether she was in her harsh eyeliner and blunt bangs phase, or pairing Doc Martens with a babydoll slip dress—whatever persona she was trying on or discarding, she had an ease about her. She had the gift of flitting in and out of the groups and subgroups, the trios and quartets and whatevers that constantly split off only to merge again. 

She had an ease about her, and from that rose up the urge for a bike. It wasn’t about a boy. It wasn’t even about rebellion, though making the vein in her dad’s left temple do a little dance was definitely a bonus some days. It wasn’t about the pony she had never wanted, whatever fiction she’d invented on the spot to make the vein in Castle’s left temple do a little dance. The bike—the desire for it—was simply a thing unto itself. 

That’s a fiction, too. She knows that as she opens up the throttle right now. The bike was a new identity—a new persona, just as invented as any other. In its infancy, it spoke to the constant itch to stand on her absolute tiptoes and stretch beyond the admittedly pleasant confines of her too-little world. Friends fell by the wayside with it—girls, guys who saw it as too absurd a posture, and she was not sad to lose them. 

Later, it was continuity. It was evidence that she had once been someone—not a tom boy, not a girly girl, but someone who needed to see the black of asphalt speeding by beneath her. Later it was survival. It was the promise of a mind absolutely blank but for the concentration it took to wind her way along rutted dirt paths with her shoulders hunched against the wind. 

It’s something like that tonight. The promise of a mind absolutely blank, and when she’s too tired for it to be safe anymore—when her thighs burn with the unrelenting effort of keeping the bike balanced beneath her at speed—she looks for the next promise. 

It looks like an actual roadhouse. It isn’t of course. The gravitational pull of Brooklyn and all its artifice is too strong. But there are bikes of all kinds leaning out front. There’s no rhyme or reason to them that would suggest any particular artisanal identity she might run afoul of, so she rolls her bike up to a spot a little apart from the rest. She slips the chinstrap of her helmet over the handlebar and wobbles a bit on her weary road legs. 

She pushes through the doors and starts working on the calculus of a woman entering a bar alone. There’s a vacant stool on the short side of the _L,_ and at first, a buffer of two to her left and one more just around the bend. She is one whisky into her promise of a blank mind. She is staring at her hands and trying to to eradicate the image, the haptic feedback, the sound of Mike Royce’s own cuffs closing around his wrists. 

“Is this seat taken?” 

She has the impression of height, dark coloring. By force of habit she catalogs likely vital statistics and enough description for a BOLO. 

“No.” She gestures with her mostly empty whisky glass. “And neither is that one or that one.” 

He shrugs and takes the stool around the bend. There’s silence and the promise of a blank mind. She shouldn’t drink any more. She won’t, but she can sit here for a good long while, thinking of nothing. Not thinking of Royce or late night treasure hunts—not thinking of the embarrassing ninety seconds of sobbing she did against Castle’s chest as they stood, both of them, knee deep in someone’s grave with jewels at their feet, glinting hard in the moonlight. 

“It’s the softail, right?” Her tall, dark caucasian male tries again. “I like to match people to their bikes. Yours is on the end, isn’t it?” 

“Why is this your line?” she asks flatly. 

“Not a line.” He makes an apologetic gesture. “Sorry to bother you.” 

“You’re not a cop, are you?” she asks after something like a decade of silence. She’s thinking of the fat, spindle-legged ponies she never drew. She’s thinking of manes and tails streaming in the wind. She is thinking of something wholly different than the misery before her. A new person, a new cast of characters. “Your name’s not Alexander?” 

“Surgeon,” he says, drawing back a little in surprise. It’s satisfying to make him draw back—to make him unsure of himself. It’s satisfying to feel in control, even though she can still feel the roar of the road beneath her feet where they’re braced on the rung of the stool. “Josh.” 

“Josh.” She repeats She likes how ordinary the name is. How plain and predictable. She likes all that implies at this moment in her life. “Kate.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: UGH. This is a Brain!Poneh Mary Sue. IT IS NOT A THING. 


	4. Ludus—Punked (3 x 04)

> _“But since I’ve never felt it before how do I know what I’m feeling is even it at all?”_   
>  _— Alexis Castle, Punked (3 x 04)_
> 
> * * *

The empathy he feels for Adam Murphy is unwelcome. It’s also intractable—it is an absolutely immovable object—but it’s unwelcome. He tries to cut himself a break. He lets himself examine the whole thing and finds that it’s mostly an artifact. It’s across-the-years empathy, appropriately enough given the case with all its titillating time travel possibilities, but that’s actually part of the problem. 

He sees the tears in in the man’s eyes. He reads the genuine grief and regret in his face, but that only sparks sympathy. He’s sorry that the man lost a friend. He’s sorry that the man’s stupidity will go in the _sine qua non_ blank on Daniel Goldstein’s death certificate in spirit, if not in fact. 

But it’s the stupidity itself—the main event—that he has this across-the-years him has empathy for. 

The lovely Julia is lovely across the board. He sees that in an instant across a coffee tray, that she is intelligent, skilled, interesting, gracious. He sees it in her genuine, unstoppable tears at the precinct. She is far from simply a pretty face, and he understands—he _knows_ Adam Murphy’s pain. 

_She would never get serious with geeks like us…_

_We figured if maybe she saw us duel …_

But he is sixteen, he is seventeen as he stands in those shoes, hurt and feeing hard done by because he’s been nice to the pretty girl, because he has made a dramatic gesture and she is unimpressed, and how is that fair? He is far and away from sixteen, from seventeen and he’s seen his daughter—the pretty girl—tying herself in knots because _he’s nice, he likes me, but … I feel bad …_

And Adam Murphy, Daniel Goldstein—these are a grown man, for Pete’s sake. They are not half-formed hormone bombs with no life experience, no real ability to step outside themselves and be kind, rather than nice, respectful, rather than fawningly attentive, bleeding into creepy. These men are—or were—far too old to be whining about the Friend Zone, to be chasing the secretary around the office, however metaphorically. So why does he have any empathy—time travel empathy or no—for either of them at all?

He would rather not ponder that. The question is as unwelcome as the troubling sentiment that prompts it.

The pretty girls like him back. They have for a while now, and he’s not fool enough to know that that has _something_ to do with the success he’s found, at least some of the time. Nevertheless, there’s an awkward, self-pitying Ricky Rodgers inside him who is gratified by the fact, regardless of its origins. There’s an awkward, self-pitying Ricky Rodgers who feels _vindicated_ and wonders if pretty girls past see his face in the bookstore window or the cover of _Cosmo_ and now aren’t they sorry? 

That’s not his best feature, certainly, but what can he do, and does anyone ever _completely_ tame their inner teenager anyway? That regrettable voice inside him isn’t why he’d like to bury the empathy he has for Adam Murphy in a one-hundred-foot hole. It’s not what’s actually bothering him. 

He doesn’t have much insight into what _is_ bothering him, other than having his time-travel dreams serially shattered by evidence and “reasonable” explanations. He tries to put it out of his mind with a steampunk shopping spree—to make the dreams of enthusiastic-to-the-point-of-self-endangerment Ricky Rodgers come true with serious funding. 

But his daughter might be in love with a boy who seems to be kind, and not just nice. Who really _does_ respect her, and not just at unexpected gunpoint. She thinks she’s in love and she wants him to tell her how she can know for sure, but he has no answer. 

She doesn’t notice. She’s a self-sustaining, half formed hormone bomb on the verge of her first life experience, but now he wonders—how _do_ you know? There’s an anxious mess in the pit of of his stomach, because this shouldn’t be a stumper. 

It isn’t for her—not for Beckett—and that doesn’t help the situation. It doesn’t help at all and he’s worried about Adam Murphy and empathy and the Friend Zone. Her rapid-fire answer is some kind of portent and a sweet, adorable thing that makes his stomach flutter. And that, come to think of it, is a portent, too. 

It’s an omen fulfilled in the form of the recently materialized Josh, who was clearly born nine feet tall with negative five percent body fat, who has never had an inner teenager to tame. They are both fulfilled in the form of Josh, the guy the pretty girls—the ones who really matter—like back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Wanting to hear about Josh? Not a thing, Brain!Poneh


	5. Recast—Anatomy of a Murder (3 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s not sure what she was expecting from him when the fact of Josh’s existence saw the light of day. She’s mostly not sure because she wasn’t expecting the fact of his existence to see even the wee, small hours of the morning any time soon. She might not have been expecting that … ever, maybe. Just because Josh’s existence is not his business, not because she doesn’t see Josh sticking around long enough for his existence to come to light. And not that she is thinking about how long he might or might not stick around, because they are nowhere near the point at which sticking around versus not sticking around is even a conversation. She’s just not sure what she was expecting. 

> _“You wanna know the truth?”_   
>  _— Richard Castle, Anatomy of a Murder (3 x 05)_

* * *

She’s not sure what she was expecting from him when the fact of Josh’s existence saw the light of day. She’s mostly not sure because she wasn’t expecting the fact of his existence to see even the wee, small hours of the morning any time soon. She might not have been expecting that … ever, maybe. Just because Josh’s existence is not his business, not because she doesn’t see Josh sticking around long enough for his existence to come to light. And not that she is thinking about how long he might or might not stick around, because they are nowhere near the point at which sticking around versus not sticking around is even a conversation. She’s just not sure what she was expecting. 

That fact that he knows—the fact that she doesn’t know what to expect from him—has her on high alert. She may actually be on the alert level above high, because there is a moment when he initiates the conversation about hospitals being hot beds of … hot beds that she wonders if he’s been snooping and staged the murder of a doctor as a set up for it. 

And even after she talks herself off a conspiracy ledge truly worthy of him, she ends up volunteering the information that Josh is a doctor, but not before quoting statistics about the sexual preferences of doctors, in general, and where in the hell did she even hear that? Her first guess would usually be from Captain Pointless Trivia himself, but that explanation seems less likely with every salacious doctor-based scenario he spins. 

She’s not sure how to take that, either. Her expectations for a Josh-inclusive feature aren’t really clarified by the fact that he seems to be writing the screenplay for _Horny Hospital 6_ in real time. She thinks she should be huffy about it. It’s kind of a jackass move. Or maybe it’s too childish to merit huffiness, or simply evidence of how shallow he is. 

Or maybe it’s mean. She feels that a little bit. He’s her friend, isn’t he? He’s her … friend-like constant irritation. Isn’t it well beyond jackass and into hurtful territory that he’d be petty enough to try to make a friend worry that the new person in her life is some kind of over-sexed himbo? She’d like to land on this interpretation. She’d like to be kind of mad at him, but she’s not sure it’s honest. 

Not much later, she’s sure it’s entirely dishonest. 

They’re standing in the curbside shade with their backs against the side of her unmarked. She asks a perfectly innocent question about Alexis and her heart-stoppingly expensive surprise, and suddenly they’re talking about the not-so-new person in his life.

He doesn’t mumble and glower and make vague allusions to something that ruined his Cool Dad plans. He relays the crossed signals with Gina, and although there’s part of him that’s still clearly irritated, he’s not one-tenth as sulky about it as she would have predicted. What’s worse—and she’s not sure why it’s worse—is he seems to listen when she observes that the woman might have overstepped, but she clearly cares about his kid. He seems to listen carefully enough that she hopes he doesn’t pick up on the sulking she’s doing for her part. 

She isn’t at all sure what she expected, but clearly sharing about their respective significant others didn’t make her top one-thousand possibilities list. But that seems to be what they’re doing, and she has some fake-it-till-you-make-it feelings about that. 

She doesn’t examine the question of why she has to fake it too closely. Instead, she wills herself not to flinch when he heads out for the night, dragging his feet and muttering about amends and bribery. She mostly manages it. She gives herself a B-minus for not flinching and resolves to do better in the morning. 

She does do better in the morning. She asks first thing how amends went—how bribery went, and the addition is sure to hurt her scores with the judges. He ducks his head and says that bribery plus sincerity seem to have done the trick. 

It takes her completely off guard. The way his gaze is turned inward about it is another thing she was simply not expecting, because he’s not turned inward about anything, right? And he’s allergic to effort, to compromise to thinking about anyone else’s feelings, especially when he’s sure that he’s been wronged. 

Except the evidence before her right now says none of that is true. He is, if not dancing-between-the-desks happy to have kissed and made up with Gina, glad about it, and that’s almost … worse. 

She doesn’t like the word. She doesn’t like herself for the word, because why is it worse that he is, for once, taking something that matters seriously? She’s answered her own question right there within the question itself. His relationship with Gina matters to him. 

She’d rather be anywhere by in that bullpen In that moment. She’d rather be on Mars or somewhere safer, pulling herself together. But she’s not on Mars and he is her friend. He is her friend-like constant irritation. 

She finds her voice. She finds a smile. “Well, it’s always a good combination.” 

She gives herself a solid D for effort. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Good thing there are no things; these are things no one wants to hear about. Or they would be if they were things. But they’re not. 


	6. Hors de Moi—3XK (3 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not his own life that flashes before his eyes in the run-down motel room with Jerry Tyson unmasked. 

> _“Why did he return to the old MO?”  
> _ _— Kate Beckett, 3XK (3 x 06)_

* * *

It’s not his own life that flashes before his eyes in the run-down motel room with Jerry Tyson unmasked. 

It’s Ryan’s life at first. Tyson sees that immediately. He _sees_ Tyson see it, and he wonders— slightly hysterically—what the poker group will thing of his utter inability to bluff. But that’s a worry for another day. If there is another day. In the moment that Tyson sees Ryan’s life flashing, he uses it to gain his compliance. He trains Ryan’s own gun on the Detective’s unconscious form. 

It works, of course. He dutifully holds his hands behind his back for binding, his attention is fixed on Ryan’s face, even more ridiculously youthful in his unconscious state than in waking life. His attention is fixed on Jenny, who once extracted a promise from Esposito to keep the man she loves safe. 

He flashes on a wedding—something bursting at the seams with family and not a bit of style. He sees sandy-haired, freckled children. He sees the life of his loyal, open-hearted friend who has the gift of goodness—seeing it, doing it, taking it home from a job that is hard and ugly almost every day of the week. It is Ryan’s life that flashes before him and his sorrow at the very real possibility that that life will end in this room is profound. 

But the scene changes—an almost cinematic cut. Tyson is looting the body. He is rolling Ryan carelessly from back to front and back again, almost as if he’s forgotten the man is not dead. His own mind scrambles to assess the strange shift, but before he discovers whether or not he can use the shift in attention to some kind of advantage, Tyson is chambering a round. He is aiming the Glock dead ahead. 

But it’s still not his life that flashes before his eyes. It is, revoltingly, Jerry Tyson’s. He understands in an entirely new way the phrase _beside myself._ He is pinpoint accurate in his cold reading of the man standing before him, and the _My Mommy Didn’t Love Me_ banality of it all is too much. He leaves himself. He is out of himself like Peter Pan’s shadow, fleeing.

His mother’s life comes next. The shrill of his phone shatters the curiously middle school back and forth between the two of them. 

_She never wanted you._

_Now, where does that come from?_

His mother’s face from a distant decade surprises them both, and he snaps back into himself, a single entity once again. In his mind, he sees her here-and-now face, its fluttering bravery in the face of recent loss. His sorrow is, again, profound for her impending grief. He lets that sorrow fill him. It crowds out fear. It staves off thoughts of his daughter, because it must. _Not now. Not. now._

He doesn’t find it strange that it’s not his life that flashes before his eyes. He doesn’t even register that it should have—that there was every possibility that he was going to die tonight—until she asks with her voice sounding sawed off and ragged: _Why did he let you live?_

Even then—even when he realizes that _most_ people would have have spent those erratic seconds contemplating their own accomplishments, regrets, truncated aspirations—it’s his writer’s mind that kicks into gear. He thinks about Rook at gunpoint, Rook duct-taped to his office chair, Rook desperately trying to hold on until Nikki can save him. 

He doesn’t know exactly what it means that it’s not _his_ life that flashes before his eyes at any point. It’s not selflessness. It would be pleasant to believe he simply values his friends, his family so much that his only thoughts, _in extremis,_ are for them alone; that’s as much a fiction, though, as the idea that he’s such a consummate professional that even staring down the barrel of a gun, his writer’s mind simply kicks in to buy him some time. 

He doesn’t know what to make of it, but he thinks of Peter Pan’s shadow again—the absence of light breaking free to dance along the walls of the world. He tells himself it’s too bizarre an image to mean anything. It’s shock. It’s simply the emotional, the physiological, the psychological consequences crashing in on him. 

He tells himself all this, but when his fingers close around hers, when her fingers close around his, it feels like more. It feels like a message to himself from beside himself. 

He has been a shadow lately. He has been a shadow right up to this moment, here, holding her hand in the eerie blue-green light bouncing off a filthy October swimming pool. He has been a shadow, and there is so little time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: If this were a thing, it would have been a thing that took a real left turn at Albuquerque. OMGWTFBBQ?


	7. Switch—Almost Famous (3 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She probably shouldn’t seek out opportunities to wind him up like this. There’s probably some unwritten rule about recreationally torturing one man when one is … involved with another. But there’s a mental pause before involved on her end, and Josh isn’t particularly invested in unwritten rules. Josh is enlightened, easy going, self-confident enough that he’s not easily threatened. Plus, Josh is not the kind of guy you take to a male strip club. 

> _“Too much?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, Almost Famous (3 x 07)_

* * *

She probably shouldn’t seek out opportunities to wind him up like this. There’s probably some unwritten rule about recreationally torturing one man when one is … involved with another. But there’s a mental pause before _involved_ on her end, and Josh isn’t particularly invested in unwritten rules. Josh is enlightened, easy going, self-confident enough that he’s not easily threatened. Plus, Josh is not the kind of guy you take to a male strip club. 

Castle _is_ the kind of guy you take, because it is _highly_ entertaining to wind him up, whether or not it’s a good idea. And she knows she probably not a good idea. She may—she does—have her own … involvement in order, but there are unwritten rules on his end of the equation, too, surely. But it’s not like it’s her job to mind those, is it? He could say no at any moment. He just doesn’t, even when _yes_ means spending the evening at a male strip club. 

She wonders more than she’d like to about the consequences of that for him. Gina, by his own accounts, both pre- and post-reconciliation, is certainly not easy going. As for her enlightenment and likelihood of feeling threatened, she wonders about it more than she should, though wondering doesn’t stop her from seeking out new and exciting winding up opportunities. 

Part of the fun is the fact that he deserves it. He’s so invested win his unshockable, _been there, done that, bought the bondage harness_ image that shocking him _does_ seem like her job some days. Yes, good idea or not, winding him up and, in the process, taking Richard Self-Styled Bad Boy Castle down a peg seems like a public service. 

And some days she hardly has to work at it. Some days, she can simply stand back and enjoy the fun as he unravels the persona all by his lonesome. That’s the turn this evening’s festivities look like they’re taking as soon as they finally make it through the eternal bouncer line and into the club. 

The demographic of The Package Store skews away from bridge and tunnel moms who’ll check their phones all night long, convinced their husbands will burn their respective houses down. It skews, instead, toward the Jamie Ruiz end of the life cycle. It skews towards his daughter’s age. The crowd is thick with sashes and tiaras and strings of penis-shaped beads looped around the necks of whooping young women and she sees the en-Dad-ening commence. 

He scowls at hemlines and necklines, and clicks his tongue at a bachelorette who is in the middle of a lap dance that’s downright tame compared to some she’s seen both on the job and off. He tuts and grumbles and she finally decides to leave him to fend for himself while she goes off to satisfy their two-drink minimum and chat up the bar staff for information. 

“Try not to start handing out copies of the _Watch Tower_ while I’m gone.” She gives him a pert wave over her shoulder as she snakes her way through the stumbling, hooting, hollering crowd.

She loses sight of him immediately. She directs her gaze forward for one second in the hopes of keeping her shoes clear of the spilled-drink minefield that is the poured-concrete floor of The Package Store. When she looks back, he has disappeared completely. 

A warning bell sounds in the back of her mind. Wound-up, en-Dad-enated Richard Castle at a male strip club is definitely good fun. Unsupervised, wound-up Richard Castle is never a good idea. But she has a job to do—the one that pays—so she presses onward to the bar. 

She gets her club soda and his Long Island Iced Tea—which, really?. She gets a lead on Derek’s workplace conflicts and wades back into the drunken sea to find her wayward, wound-up scoundrel-cum-Dad. She—even she, in her still intact four-inch heels—has to raise up on her toes to get the lay of the land. 

She sees a knot of women, all seated, heads bent toward something in their midst. Not a one of them is the least bit interested in the entr’acte dancers and their bid for bills, and she knows why. She knows _exactly_ why. Like a bird unerringly seeking true north, she heads tour the knot, glasses raised carefully overhead. 

“Castle!” She doesn’t exactly nail the blasé attitude she’d planned on. She hears his name echoing around in her head and it sounds impressed, scandalized, wound up. 

The sea of women parts. He looks up, eyes wide, as though her appearance is such a surprise. “Hey honey,” he says and after that it’s just noise bouncing between her ears, though she picks out _girlfriend_ and _adventurous_ in the section of her brain not devoted to killing him. 

The sea of women recedes, and she notes that he does not seem to have been delivering a lecture about the evils of lap dances, and as the scene empties and he is not particularly concerned with _their_ hemlines. 

He fixes her with a hapless grin that isn’t hapless in the least. She realizes—she admits—that two are constantly playing at this game. He recreationally tortures her; he and probably thinks it’s a public service to take her down a peg. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: If Beckett were not wearing sexy jammies outside her home, this might have been a thing. But Beckett is wearing sexy jammies outside her home.


	8. Suit—Murder Most Fowl (3 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has something he wants to ask her. Well, he has—as usual—a million things he wants to ask her, eighty percent of which (conservatively) would put his bodily integrity at risk. But right now—today—he has a very specific ask in mind, and he’s not sure how to approach it. 

> _“Any favorite hangouts?”_   
>  _— Kate Beckett, Murder Most Fowl (3 x 08)_

* * *

He has something he wants to ask her. Well, he has—as usual—a million things he wants to ask her, eighty percent of which (conservatively) would put his bodily integrity at risk. But right now—today—he has a very specific ask in mind, and he’s not sure how to approach it. 

It has to do with Lightbulb Len and the poetry of his existence. That, right there, is part of the reason he’s not sure how to approach his ask: He’s already gotten The Look once for juxtaposing murder and poetry, so that’s a no go. He’s happy enough to choose another word, though. He’s very invested in his ask, and he doesn’t have a lot of time. 

He’s happy to talk about Lightbulb Len as archetype—as a hard-working, noble Hektor in world that clamors for Achilles, the plodding, devoted Toad in a city full of Frogs. He’s happy to home in on the plot here. He could go on for days about the novel passions of Len Levitt and his search for subway safety and ornithological truth. 

He could tug on the most intractable heartstrings in recounting the man’s innate sense of duty and decency, his in-the-moment bravery, as he turned his camera on the man abducting Tyler Donegal at gunpoint, and in so doing, lost his life. And don’t even get him started on the supporting cast in Len’s life. Arthur Sansone alone deserves a spinoff series, quite possibly featuring Byron Singer as his nemesis. And possibly his roommate. Because he has pored over the photos of Lightbulb Len’s apartment, and he is deeply interested in what the home life of Arthur Sansone and Byron Singer might be like. 

He can paint a picture of Lightbulb Len however she likes. He’s happy to frame it whatever literary terms are least likely to irritate her, most likely to make her say yes to the ask he still doesn’t know how to approach.

He needs to figure that out, sooner rather than later, and not just because the ask is on a schedule. She knows something is up. He’s been fidgety all day, and the day has been more than slow enough for her to notice. Five times an hour he’s been leaning in, drawing breath to just come out with it, then snapping his jaw shut when he chickens out. She’s noticed and time is hurtling forward like a subway train. 

“Castle.” She finally breaks. She’s been hardcore ignoring him for a solid hour and a half, but she breaks, and he may have fidgeted his final fidget. She pinches the bridge of her nose and squeezes her eyes shut. _“What?_ ” 

“It’s nothing,” he says swiftly, and immediately wishes it were anatomically possible for him to give himself a swift kick. “Too much—too much coffee. I lose track, you know. And I like—I like to keep you company. And have you thought of cutting down? Because you might …” 

He trails off well after his babbling has taken him into dangerous territory, vis-à-vis that bodily integrity he’s grown so attached to. She cracks one eye open to stare him down. She waits to see if he has finally babbled himself out for the moment.

“I know about the bag,” she says in the voice that universally precedes a suspect making a confession so comprehensive, they’ll probably have to repeat high school geometry over that last exam they cheated on. He knows better—for once—than to interrupt. “I know you want something.” Her one baleful eye closes again. She cups her forehead in her palm and squeezes her temples. “Just ask.” 

“Will you go to the park with me?” It comes out without the necessary spaces between the words. It causes a multi-consonant pile-up. “I have binoculars—new fancy ones. And I brought the camera I got Alexis for her orienteering trip. I have a pen—I have a bunch of my best pens—so we can put it in the log. And I brought a blanket and a thermos and …” His autonomic nervous system insists on a breath. It stalls out his momentum, and he finishes lamely, “Because of Len. I thought it would be nice.” 

“To see the red-tailed hawks.” She laughs from behind her hand. A smile makes its way fully across her face and he’s suddenly, wildly glad that he asked. 

He nods vigorously—idiotically, probably. “But we have to hurry—”

It’s unnecessary urgency. She’s on her feet. She has her keys in hand and she’s hauling his bag of gear out from under Ryan’s desk where he’d stashed it. She’s stabbing the elevator button while he toils in her wake. 

“Gotta hurry,” she affirms. She checks her watch. “They nest at dusk.”   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Super rough night to write. Yet not writing is worse. No things here at all. 


	9. Hybrid Vigor—Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind (3 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If she’s said it once, she’s said it a million times: She is not Nikki Heat But there are days when she is fairly certain that she is somehow living in the confines of a work of fiction, courtesy of Richard Castle’s erratic brain. The day they find Marie Subbarao’s body is definitely one of them. 

> _“Are you saying you think that this is real?”  
> _ _— Kevin Ryan. Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind (3 x 09)_

* * *

If she’s said it once, she’s said it a million times: She is not Nikki Heat But there are days when she is fairly certain that she _is_ somehow living in the confines of a work of fiction, courtesy of Richard Castle’s erratic brain. The day they find Marie Subbarao’s body is definitely one of them. 

She has a baffled ME and a vic who does, indeed, look like an overstuffed sausage—an image caption by the Author himself that’s so apt, she may never eat again. Events unfold in almost game-like fashion, and that’s his influence, too, no doubt. The case keeps almost, but not quite, pulling in the direction of little green men, and there’s a whole lot of back-and-forth smirking going on. 

Marie is an astrophysicist with a SETI grant to her name—smirk point Castle. But she mostly analyzes data for NASA and, oh yeah, her office is around the corner from something that simulates the vacuum of space—two smirk points to Beckett. It goes on and on like that. It’s ridiculous. 

There’s a certified UFO kook-cum-con artist with motive, and there’s nothing she doesn’t love about that, right up until the moment he spills a story about their level-headed, kook-averse vic having some kind of break with reality in the days before her death. And oh, by the way, there’s a shadowy, furniture-stealing government conspiracy, too, because the word _excess_ is not in the vocabulary of Richard Castle, who is clearly writing her life right now. 

There are not one, but two, off-the-wall murder weapons within shouting distance of their body drop, except neither one is the murder weapon. There is a mystery trip taken by their vic to another facility with the kind of telescope the would give her eyes to go with the ears of her own. There is an honest-to-God bright light in the night sky. Her car, her phone, her watch come to a standstill, and she is about to take stern measures indeed to rein in her own personal Walter Mitty. 

But before she can, they are abducted. She pictures him lobbing zingers at some agent made of granite who is trying to get information out of him. She tries to imagine him as he would imagine himself, cool and collected, sarcastic and annoying. She tries to imagine herself as he would imagine her, and her head throbs with the twisted logic of that, and whatever the hell these clowns knocked her out with. Her head throbs at the intimidation light, because what secret agency shakedown would be complete without a cliché bad guy intimidation light?

She wants to tell him to call cut or whatever it is writers do when their story has spun this far out of control. She wants to tell him that no one is going to buy anything about the story going on inside his head if he doesn’t stop slathering genre on top of genre. But she can’t tell him that, because they’ve taken him somewhere. They’ve separated the two of them and her attention is awkwardly divided between fruitless attempts to extract information about her case from Central Casting Bad Guy Number Three and worrying about him. 

The divided attention situation solves itself. The last thing she remembers before blackness rises up to meet her is a ludicrous, pistol-grip auto syringe that looks like it was recently picked up from a prop table on the set of _The Third Man._ She groans as she registers the fact that the definite noir touches here mean they’re into genre number three, at least, and he really should see a doctor for his mash-up problem. 

She remembers that thought. She’s holding on to it as the blackness begins to lift. She sense his presence well before she’s anything close to with it. She _smells_ him. She feels the curious warmth of a steady, solid shoulder beneath her cheek and she has the overwhelming desire to take a luxurious, full-body stretch—the kind that curls her toes and tickles her spine in a most pleasant way. 

She’d like to give in to the urge—stretch from head to toe, then nestle closer into the pleasant warmth next to her—but even in her pleasantly weary, fuzzy-headed state, there’s an alarm bell sounding. There’s trouble brewing. 

She lifts her cheek with a barely suppressed groan of protest and finds her eyes locked on his. She breathes him in and feels the startled hitch of his ribs as he returns the favor. Her pulse speeds up and her insides flip. 

_Romance_ , she thinks, inside the confines of a work of fiction, courtesy of Richard Castle’s erratic brain. It’s one genre too many. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: If you don’t label the thing, there’s no shelf for the thing. This has no shelf space and is not a thing.


	10. Keen—Last Call (3 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kate Beckett has a case of the giggles. It is a fascinating thing, as impossible a phenomenon as the iridescent edge of a soap bubble, and—he fears—as fragile.

> _“What’d I win?”_   
>  _— “Pick-Up” Pete Mucha, Last Call (3 x 10)_

* * *

Kate Beckett has a case of the giggles. It is a fascinating thing, as impossible a phenomenon as the iridescent edge of a soap bubble, and—he fears—as fragile. 

It’s kept him kind of quiet tonight, and that makes the others suspicious. The boys, the Captain, they’ve been giving him the side eye all night, waiting for him to tease her, because—good _Lord_ —she has had a case of of the giggles for an hour running, and how is it even possible that he is not teasing, goading, pulling the pigtail she’s dangling in his face? 

But he doesn’t have the slightest desire to do any of that, and honestly, his heart is in his throat any time any one of them looks straight at him and then opens his mouth. He stands ready to leap on Esposito like a live grenade, ready to clap his hand over Ryan’s mouth at the slightest indication that either one of them is going to disrupt this glorious thing. The Captain, he’s not as nervous about. The Captain, he thinks, understands a little too well why this turn of events has kept him kind of quiet tonight. 

They’ve all done drinks together before, the four of them, with and without The Captain, with and without Lanie, Jenny, and so on. He and Beckett have, on fairly rare occasions, had a cautious, keep-it-short drink, just the two of them. The point is, he’s seen her drink before. He’s seen her in the presence and under the influence of alcohol. He’s never seen this. 

He has seen her loose-limbed and relaxed with a beer or whisky in her hand. He’s seen her tense and angry, clutching the glass and forcing herself to take it slow, because she’s too well aware of the dangers of alcohol as coping strategy. 

He’s seen her taking polite sips and begging off early when she’s ticking a box so Lanie won’t hound her about the tumbleweeds tumbling through the dusty landscape of her social life. And he’s seen her working the timing of a second drink so that someone will stay, because she’s lonely sometimes, though she’d die—or, more likely, murder them all, hide the bodies, and get away with it—before she’d admit that. 

But he has never seen her like this. He has never seen her with a case of the giggles. 

It’s not the scotch, which she likes, though she’s been grudging in her admission of that, just on principle. “Because your mother’s not here. I have to keep your ego in check, Castle.” 

They all like the scotch, but it’s _big._ It’s definitely made for sipping, and they’ve hardly made a dent. So it is unlikely that he can finagle a repeat performance of this via strategic deployment of the less extravagant of his recent acquisitions, more’s the pity. 

He is very interested in the possibility of repeat performances of this, because it is utterly charming. She’s telling sweet, funny stories from her childhood and racy ones from much later on. She is open and expansive and light, and he’s not sure how it is that every single person in the bar has not gravitated to their table to hang on every perfectly turned phrase, every tinkling laugh, every breathless giggle. He doesn’t know how it is that it’s just the three of them, gathered around as she holds court, lucky enough to be there for this. 

Even that number dwindles. The Captain pushes to his feet, muttering about the drive before him. The boys rediscover their watches not long after. He stares into his almost empty glass trying to push away the melancholy that will crowd in if he’ll let it. 

She’ll surely go now. She won’t linger when it’s just him, even with a case of the giggles—especially with a case of the giggles. He’s steeling himself for it when her glass, propelled by the tip of one elegant finger slides into his field of view. 

“A drop?” She arches her eyebrow at him, the same eyebrow that, just today, has been sultry, commanding, a threat, but here and now it’s this sparkling gesture that comes with a giggle—just a little one—like they’re breaking curfew together. 

“A drop,” he says. He pours for her. He pours for himself and clinks his glass against hers when she holds it out. 

They fall quiet. He thinks the spell is breaking—is broken—and he tries to be grateful for this, for everything that has come before now, for everything that is still before him, after all. He’s so intent on not being greedy that he almost misses the fact that she’s humming to herself. It’s a jaunty countermelody to whatever Eddie’s got going. 

“What’s up with you tonight?” 

He asks before he can stop himself—before he can fall on himself like a live grenade. He turns to her, miserable and more than ready to apologize, but she turns to him with a wide grin. She _giggles_. 

“This is neat,” she says. She leans forward over her drink like it’s the biggest secret in the world. “You bought a bar.” That comes with a stage whisper and a huge gesture. “That’s _so_ dumb and huge. But this place—“ she twists in her chair, taking in the framed faces on the wall. She giggles. “This place is _neat.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: A giggle asks for too much suspension of disbelief. It is disqualified as a thing. 


	11. Dissident—Nikki Heat (3 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is unduly interested in the No moment from the second that Natalie Rhodes shares the news of this shocking word she’s never heard from a man before. She is fascinated by the No moment, even as she navigates that particular syllables-are-lava conversation that ends with Natalie demanding, wild-eyed, that she—Kate—give him permission to undo—to take back—the No moment. 

> _“Torturing yourself?”  
> _ _—Alexis Castle, Nikki Heat (3 x 11)_

* * *

She is unduly interested in the _No_ moment from the second that Natalie Rhodes shares the news of this shocking word she’s never heard from a man before. She is _fascinated_ by the _No_ moment, even as she navigates that particular _syllables-are-lava_ conversation that ends with Natalie demanding, wild-eyed, that she—Kate—give him permission to undo—to take back—the _No_ moment. 

_Not a chance._ That’s the fierce riposte between her teeth as she extricates herself from the situation as best she can. There will be no undoing of the _No_ moment on her watch. _Not a chance._

It’s a sentiment that doesn’t bear examination, not comfortably, anyway. Her mind has an exit from that line of thinking, ready made. It crafts the moment from details she has at her fingertips. It pieces them together like a timeline up on the board. 

Fact: Natalie Rhodes’ believes—seriously seems to believe—that her transformation into Nikki Heat will involve a community-theater-grade wig and a blouse that Lanie would have physically ripped from her body on sight, not just for the coffin-lining ruching, but its obviously flammable material. She seems to have counted on the element of surprise to carry her through her research, and it’s possible she doesn’t understand at all that the element of surprise—at least in attempted seduction scenarios—should not bleed into shock and horror. 

Fact: Natalie Rhodes is staying at the shiny new, boutique-ier-than-thou Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo. She’d caught a body there not a month after its grand opening—a bludgeoning with some apparently expensive objet d’art and considerable blood spatter on the busy wallpaper that had been hand-painted by gnomes shipped in from their secret kingdom beneath Battery Park or something. 

Her mind has a field day mapping out the _No_ moment from there. It imagines Castle, blinded by the glint of candlelight off the hideously shiny purple fabric stretched across Natalie Rhodes’ factory-fresh chest, knocking over said candle in his haste to beat a retreat, and sending both blouse and wig up in flames and a wall of acrid smoke. That version ends with Natalie Rhodes, melodramatic, but unharmed departing by ambulance for treatment in her basic famous person oxygen bubble or whatever. 

There’s a second version that has Benny Hill music. It has Natalie Rhodes chasing Castle around the negative square footage of the “Meadow Suite,” while he weaves in and out of the tasteless collection of mismatched furniture in migraine-inducingly busy fabrics as he shouts _No_ over and over and tries to find the exit. That one has hotel security knocking Natalie down and pulling off the stupid wig like the mask on a Scooby-Doo villain. 

There are others—dozens of others—and it’s amusing. It kills the time as she skulks around the perimeter of the break room just trying to find a moment’s peace. There’s none to be had, of course—not with the _No_ moment’s leading man skulking around, on his usual mission to deny her the very peace she’s seeking. 

It’s a dangerous thing, the two of them alone, under the circumstances. _No_ moment or no, Natalie Rhodes has stirred up some things. Natalie Rhodes, truth be told, has backfired. She’d said _yes_ to Natalie Rhodes’ people knowing that it would be torture for him. She’d said _yes_ to get a tiny bit of her own back for all he puts her through. 

But Natalie Rhodes and her wig, Natalie Rhodes and the mirror she thinks he’s holding up to Kate—to Nikki—have not been the simple path to driving Castle mad that she’d been counting on. Natalie Rhodes and the _No_ moment exist in the shadow of possibility. They exist in the shadow of a _Yes_ moment that he has every right to have with whatever Nikki Heat wannabes he pleases. 

But he didn’t this time. He hasn’t, and she is fascinated by that. She is unduly curious to know. She is powerless not to ask. 

_If it’s so adorable, why didn’t you sleep with me?_

There’s a gravitational, blue note _-infused_ pause. She is hot and cold with her heart pounding, even as it stands still. There is the possibility for the eternity of that pause that she’ll leave it there—that she won’t qualify or explain, she’ll simply leave her request for information as is.

But the pause is a moment she’s _not_ at liberty to have, because there’s Josh, and this is a dangerous thing. So she qualifies, she inches away from it. 

_Her ‘me’, not me ‘me’._

There’s a pause, a caesura laden with disappointment, before he answers in matching, glib tones. 

_Way too meta_ , he says. It’s a _No_ moment of a different kind altogether. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Cheap shots at wardrobe are definitely not a thing. Much like Laura Prepon. An anti-thing.


	12. Hanno—Poof! You're Dead (3 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has been trying hard with Gina for a while now. He’d prefer not to put a start date on what constitutes a while. He fears there are no good answers there. His mind seeks them out anyway. 

> _“Can you think of any reason for the change?”  
> _ _— Kate Beckett, Poof! You’re Dead (3 x 12)_

* * *

He has been trying hard with Gina for a while now. He’d prefer not to put a start date on what constitutes _a while._ He fears there are no good answers there. His mind seeks them out anyway. 

Since before the holidays. _A while_ certainly extends at least that far back, and that doesn’t feel great. The holidays themselves were anything but great with Gina’s fussy tastes casting a pall over the festivities on the home front, and his utter lack of enthusiasm for four solid weeks of business-related holiday parties, each more tedious than the last. And the idea of keeping it together solely for the sake of not rocking the boat until the holidays were over is about the least Richard Castle thing he’s ever heard. But he’s been trying hard. 

That, it pains him to say, is probably the runner up in the Least Richard Castle Pageant. That’s new, the burn of his cheeks and the way his eyes seek the ground when he thinks about how very un _him_ trying has been when it comes to relationships. But that’s been his playboy brand since Meredith—since the end of Kyra, really, and now is a really bad time to think too long or too deeply about when that era ended. 

But it’s impossible _not_ to think about, because truthfully, it goes back well before the holidays. It predates, by a long shot, him gritting his teeth and pretending to like her French Laundry–inspired stuffing with organ meats and raisins, rather than white bread cubes and margarine. It stretches back beyond Veteran’s Day and Halloween and National Kevin Day. It stretches back, in fact, to the autumnal equinox and the exact moment that he learned that Detective Deming was no longer darkening Detective Beckett’s doorstep. 

There’s not much point in feigning ignorance of the timeline. There’s even less point in denying the fact that at that exact moment, he was ready to enthusiastically kick Gina to the curb. And at the exact moment after that, some kind of long-term trajectory had appeared in his head. He couldn’t see the whole of it then. He still can’t see the whole of it now, but he has navigated by instinct from the moment that—Demming or no Demming—he had to try with Gina, that to do any less would somehow be breaking faith with her—with the suddenly (or maybe not so suddenly) single Detective Beckett. 

This is the truth of it—the irony—that he sits uncomfortably with now. Because he woulda, coulda, shoulda stopped trying with Gina at some undetermined point before the holidays. If he’d ever been in the habit of working at relationships he might not have wandered blind around this for so long. He might have recognized the points of inflection where the two of them going their separate ways made the most sense. 

But he’s never been in the habit, and the road has been hard. It’s still hard, even though he understands that he’s come to the critical moment where he’ll answer the phone, he’ll resist the petty tendrils that have bound he and Gina tightly and unhappily together. He will make the break he should have made weeks ago, the first time he caught himself thinking _What’s the harm? She’s with Josh anyway._

That absolutely should have been the critical moment, and yet it’s only been today, just this afternoon, that the next critical bit of the long-term trajectory in his had unfolded. Just as he’d stood, a hair’s breadth away from kissing her, a vast new expanse of it had unfolded. 

He still can’t see the whole of it. The edges are ragged and tucked in on themselves. Much of it still bears the legend: _Here Be Dragons. (Probably. Maybe. Some days, definitely.)_ He doesn’t know where this ends up, and there’s almost no part of him that feels relieved when he tells Gina, in no uncertain terms, that it’s over. He is … regretful, if not actively hurting, as she is. 

He wishes, if he is honest, that he and Gina had not drifted through the _might as well_ summer together. He wishes that he were with Kate—that the two of them had found a way to fight through early summer’s mixed signals and missed messages. He wishes they had not been the victims of such terrible timing, He wishes the two of them had rung in the new year together with champagne and stupid movies. 

All this is true, if he’s honest, and yet it’s also true that he’s not sorry he tried to be with Gina—that he was as pleasant as he could be. He knows with absolute clarity the road forward, but he’s not sorry that he’s learned to try. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: National Kevin Day is a thing. This is not. 


	13. Proof Against—Knockdown (3 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She tests herself sometimes. When it comes to her secret behind the shutters, she tests herself to see how long she can go without spending some portion of her day working her way methodically from one corner, high up, then down, across, back up. She experiments to make sure that she’s not losing herself again. 

> _“Well, who the hell is he then?”_   
>  _— John Raglan, Knockdown (3 x 13)_

* * *

She tests herself sometimes. When it comes to her secret behind the shutters, she tests herself to see how long she can go without spending some portion of her day working her way methodically from one corner, high up, then down, across, back up. She experiments to make sure that she’s not losing herself again. 

It’s a relatively new practice—a trade-off, of sorts, because she has a home now, or something that will _be_ a home, given a little time. In her dismal sublet—in her two dismal sublets, actually—a version of the board had been her consolation for losing Dick Coonan and all his secrets to a bullet from her own gun, for losing so much just a few weeks later to Scott Dunn and his penchant for fire. She hadn’t tested herself once in her dismal sublets. She hadn’t tested herself once over the summer, while he was gone. 

But now she is here. There is furniture that doesn’t smell like someone else’s sadness. There are curtains and sculptures and tchotchkes. There’s art on the walls and a secret behind the shutters. She wasn’t sure there would be. 

_Maybe not,_ she’d said to herself, three times or four, as she circled all of this in the last still-packed box. _Probably shouldn’t,_ she’d said, even as she’d hunted up tape and thumb tacks and her stepladder and assembled her scissors and notecards and favorite pens on the sill. 

So there is the secret. It’s more extensive, by far, than the last time she took it down and packed it away, though dead ends and verification of things she already knows—already knows that she _doesn’t_ know—account for most of the growth. And these periodic experiments are the deal she made with herself when it went back up in her new home. 

It can’t be an everyday thing. It can’t be an all-night thing. She knows at the remove of so much time that she was not exactly as present or self-reflective as she should have been during the year of therapy that led her to cut off her investigation entirely, but she remembers that loss of self—that loss of everyone outside herself—with inky tendrils of fear that curl around her guts, her lungs, her heart. She remembers how she almost let her dad drink himself to death, too, so consumed by the case was she. 

So she doesn’t allow herself daily trips to the shutters. She sets a _go-the-hell-to-bed_ timer on the nights that she grabs take out and plants herself in front of them. She does chin-ups and yoga and she goes out for runs on her off days so that she’s honoring the spirit of the _not every day_ rule, not just the letter. 

She has been good. She has been keeping it together. But John Raglan, Gary McAllister, Hal Lockwood—these men are one strand after another in a steel tension cable snapping and slicing through the air. Joe Pulgatti, who should have known from the way that her mother talked about her that she would become a cop, is another. The facts of the case—the first really new facts she’s had since Clark Murray walked into the bullpen a year ago—every one them is another strand gone, and who knows when the whole thing will give way? 

Part of her—a large and dangerous part of her—wants it to. She is tired of chin-ups and yoga and running. She is tired of being the daughter who failed her mother, and for every tendril of fear at the idea of losing herself, there’s a root sunk deep into the core of her that believes it would be worth it to bring him down, to slay the dragon now that he’s awake. 

She’s afraid of that. She still knows enough to be afraid, but will she a week from now? A month? 

Her experiments and self-accountability seem inadequate. They _are_ inadequate, as is amply and immediately demonstrated when she drops her coat immediately inside the door when she gets back from her visit from Raglan and moves directly to the shutters. It’s dawn when she looks up again. She is very nearly late for work and she knows that her current checks and balances are inadequate, but she doesn’t know what else to do. 

The answer comes when she’s sitting at her desk trying not shake from the combination of exhaustion and a staggering amount of caffeine pounded in a startlingly short amount of time. Her inbox had filled up considerably, even in the short amount of time that Montgomery had benched her. 

She can’t face pure paperwork. It’s a recipe for feeling useless, which is the last thing she needs right now. But tucked in with things for signature, things to be filed, things to be moved from point A to point B, there’s the Lockwood stuff she’s been avoiding as the second-to-last thing she needs. She gives in to it. She twists to look over one shoulder, then the other, as though anyone’s watching her. She gives in to temptation to peek.

Fate pulls her up short. Lockwood’s surveillance photos are on top, and there she is courtesy of the intimacy of the long lens. Anger flares through her. Another strand of the steel cable goes _ping!_ But the second photo is the answer. It stops her heart and turns the breath icy and solid in her lungs. It’s him, right there in front of the precinct—right by her side like the plucky sidekick he is. 

She thinks of his kiss—of her kiss and, ultimately, _their_ kiss. Her heart beats again, to say the least. Her breath leaves her body painfully and comes back in the same way. But she has clarity in her hands now. She has the answer. 

She sneaks a copy of the photo. It’s on cheap copier paper, but at least it’s color. She smuggles it into her bag and makes sure of it ten times an hour for the rest of the day. She takes it home that night. She throws open the shutters and tacks it up in the center, just below her mom’s picture. She tears herself away and closes the shutters again. 

She makes herself watch TV. She does chin-ups. She is calmer. She can’t quite believe that it wouldn’t be worth it to lose herself if she could get the man who killed her mom. Losing him is an entirely different matter. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Josh. Not a thing that can keep a Detective from losing it. Castle lips? Lips of Castle? Different story. 


	14. Affirmative—Lucky Stiff (3 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He feels like he’s declared himself now. He has broken up with Gina, and even though it wasn’t explicitly his intention—not explicitly—he did so in a highly visible if not downright public way. And they have talked about it, as much as they talk about anything: Thanks for not mentioning … thanks for not asking. 

_“Any sign yet?”_   
_— Kate Beckett, Lucky Stiff (3 x 14)_

* * *

He feels like he’s declared himself now. He has broken up with Gina, and even though it wasn’t explicitly his intention—not explicitly—he did so in a highly visible if not downright _public_ way. And they have talked about it, as much as they talk about anything: _Thanks for not mentioning … thanks for not asking._

He has kissed her. He may have kissed her twice, or maybe they went Dutch on the whole kiss thing, and he’s honestly not really sure which he’d prefer, the manly, take-charge energy of two kisses initiated by him, or the knee-weakening interpretation that he’d kissed her, and she had kissed him right back. He’s not sure if it’ll be a one-sided siege or mutual surrender when he eventually tells the story to their inevitable children. 

Either way, he feels like he’s laid his cards on the table and the ball is in her court. His metaphors are out of control and mixing freely, but there can be no doubt where he stands on the issue of Them. 

He has no regrets about Gina and certainly no regrets about any and all of his roles in the kiss(es)—other than their unfortunate disruption by a thug who’d needed pistol-whipping—but it’s nerve-wracking waiting to see how she’ll respond. If she’ll freeze over, if she’ll run. If she’ll—saints and fluffy bunnies forfend—run off to Vegas and marry Josh as precautionary measure. 

He’s been bracing for any and all of those reactions and seven or eight he hasn’t thought of, but so far it has seemed unnecessary. So far she is standing her ground at the very least. 

She calls him to keep her company on the stakeout when the was decidedly optional. She won’t tell him about her own lottery fantasies—and they may be in _I’ve never torn a picture out of bridal magazine_ territory here. She may genuinely have none, and she kind of goes out of her way to let him know that she’s not shutting him down. She’s not freezing him out. She keeps her eyes straight ahead, looking out into night and hesitantly asks what his best-seller windfalls have amplified in him. 

She starts a genuine conversation—a searching, intimate one—but she also argues with him about the best kind of house to have when they all have to move to his property on the moon. She refuses to admit that bunkbeds for the boys will be both necessary and awesome. She laughs and bickers with him in a way that is, if anything, easier and more fun than it was before the breakup with Gina, before the kiss. 

She concocts a scheme to which he, and okay, his Ferrari, are central. A scheme where they play dress-up, and he really has to rein in his desire to read into that. He has to surreptitiously pinch himself to be sure that this is not, in fact, _his_ hare-brained scheme when she pulls up in front of her place to change for the club, and it’s clear she expects him to come up and hang out while she does. 

There is some serious next-level reining it in while all that is going on, because she is in the other room. She’s changing out of one set of clothes and into another, and a great deal of her must be exposed at various points in the process. She’s _changing_ , and she’s calling out to him while he paces around the living room as though this is just completely normal. Like he is just, on a regular basis, in the next room while she’s down to her unmentionables and they’re talking dirt bag–busting strategies. 

She emerges, utterly transformed, in a surprisingly short amount of time. She takes his breath away, and he almost says so. He almost lapses into poetry that will indubitably be cribbed from someone who can write poetry, but he manages to keep it together and confine himself to a strangled _Wow_ that prompts a distracted smile that’s equal parts grateful and smug 

She’s moving around the living room, the kitchen, pounding a bottle of water, sorting the essentials out of her large shoulder bag and into the tiny clutch that goes with the ensemble she’s decided on for the evening’s festivities. She’s lecturing him all the while. She’s giving him minute instructions, and then she’s finally in the entry way with him. 

She makes sure of the clasp on one dangling earring with one hand and points into the coat closet with the other, indicating something with a wide, glossy collar and a positively noir silhouette. He slides the coat off the hanger and holds it for her. He frees her hair from the collar as he nods and repeats the instructions back to her, hardly hearing her, himself, or anything over the roar in his ears. 

This is all familiar. It’s _comfortable._ They’re just about to head through the door, when there’s some issue with one of her patent-leather platform pumps. She stops halfway out the door. She half-turns to him, and without a second thought, she plants a hand on his shoulder to steady herself as she reaches down and resettles the shoe. 

That is the moment that settles his nerves and steels him to his purpose. She reaches out for him, without hesitation, to steady herself. Their eyes meet for just a fraction of a second, and he sees years from now. He sees inevitable children and bunk beds for the boys on the moon. She’s not quite ready to declare herself. But he sees, in her eyes—the warmth of these tiny moments that she has invited him into—the possibility of it. 

He sees movement, progress, and the promise of declaration—the promise that she will think about it, sealed with a kiss or two, and he can be patient. He has declared himself, and he can be patient. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The absence of Josh’s things in Beckett’s dwelling. Not a thing


	15. Vicarious—The Final Nail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She spends a lot of her days and nights wading through the end of the emotional spectrum where sympathy and pity tangle together like waterlogged weeds. People want to believe the best of their loved ones. They don’t want to believe the worst of even perfect strangers. They don’t want to dwell on the chaos—the darkness—that prevails in the world most of the time. 

> _“You really think I’m that cold?”  
>  — Damian Westlake, The Final Nail (3 x 15)_

* * *

She spends a lot of her days and nights wading through the end of the emotional spectrum where sympathy and pity tangle together like waterlogged weeds. People want to believe the best of their loved ones. They _don’t_ want to believe the worst of even perfect strangers. They don’t want to dwell on the chaos—the darkness—that prevails in the world most of the time. 

She understands that. She reaches for sympathy first, always. A person who has lost a loved one, who has violently and unexpectedly had a loved one taken from them, is rarely In a position to entertain the hard truth that some other loved one had something to do with it. That hard truth is her everyday, and she wouldn’t wish it on anyone. So she reaches for sympathy. 

She _has_ empathy, reflexively. Non-negotiably. She has infinite patience with denial, with anger, even with stubborn, damaging self-protection that sometimes leads people into a hell-bent determination to shield the guilty and spare themselves loss piled upon loss. She empathizes with the clouded mindset, with the need to sink one’s fingers into something familiar and snatch it close. 

She holds pity in reserve. It’s a back-pocket coping mechanism that she tries not to draw on unless there’s no alternative—unless denial, disbelief, dysfunction persist to the point of cuffs and lock-up and there’s nothing more she can offer. Pity tastes like ashes. It tastes like failure. 

She thinks a lot about them—sympathy, empathy, pity—and mostly she keeps them clear in her mind. Mostly, she can find the right strand to follow to do her work, to get justice for the victim, to help the bereaved start coming to terms with the shockwaves that will run through the rest of their lives. Mostly they serve her well. 

They don’t serve her well when it comes to Damian Westlake. When it comes to Castle and his unshakable faith. 

She’s angry with him from the start. Beyond being thrown for a loop to find him sipping coffee with the husband of her vic, beyond even his most definitely over-the-line behavior in the initial interview, she is furious with his naiveté. She is _livid_ when the murder of Westlake’s father comes to light, too livid to entertain, even momentarily, the idea that he probably _didn’t_ know that Damian was a suspect. 

She’s angry with him in a way that is fundamentally unkind. She realizes this in some part of herself that looks on from a distance, that is shocked to see that her empathy has deserted her, that she has not reached for sympathy, that even the ashen taste of pity would be preferable to the poison on the tip of her tongue. 

She banishes him for his own good as much as hers. She falls back on procedure and technicality. She tells herself she is being a good cop, and every one around her seems to concur. She has done the right thing—a good thing—in sparing him, in protecting the investigation. 

Then and there, the next day on everyone takes it as a good thing that Castle has not appeared. Esposito nods to say as much as they hunker down with Victoria and Damien Westlake’s life in credit card and bank statements. Ryan gives her a rueful, supportive smile to say the same. But because he’s Ryan, he murmurs under his breath, _But I feel for the guy._

She has to walk away, then. She mumbles that she needs coffee and strides past the break room, to the elevators. She heads outside without coat or gloves and feels better for the wind stinging her skin and making her eyes stream. She paces to the corner and back to the precinct. 

_I feel for the guy._

Ryan’s voice pings around the inside of her head. It jostles loose a memory, something distant and buried deep. A friend of her dad’s—one of his few really close friends from way back—had died In a car accident. The circumstances were fraught and unclear. There was a strong possibility—a near certainty, given later revelations about trouble the man had been on the verge of—that he’d driven himself off the road deliberately. 

Her dad, as ever, had turned inward. To her eye, it had looked like stoicism—like coping. The incident faded. Life went on, though she’d known, or at least had some vague sense, that all was not right in her home. She’d come across her mother one day, weeping uncontrollably with her head resting on one fist at the dining room table. 

She’d sat with her. She’d pulled a chair close and simply sat with her palm resting on her mom’s shoulder blade. The tears stopped eventually. Her mom had taken her hand and held it tight. _I hurt for him, Katie,_ she had explained. _That’s how it is with love. You just hurt for them._

She paces to the corner again. She plants her fists on the filthy bricks of the precinct building and lets her chin drop to her chest. She breathes through an electric tangle of confusion and worry. She breaths through anger and whatever the hell else seems to be burbling up from the dark center of her. She breathes through it, then makes her way back to the glass door of the precinct. 

She joins the boys in the workroom. They must smell winter on her. They must shiver with the chill she’s brought with her rolling through the tiny room, but they don’t ask. 

She’s not surprised to look up and find him looming in the break room door at the exact moment her struggle with the damned espresso machine reaches its apotheosis. She’s not surprised to find him apologetic, but still convinced of his friend’s innocence. 

She has to break his heart ten times over before their work is done. She has to break her own just as many, because that’s how it is … 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A.N: Abstract things that are not things sometimes make a break for it and totally get away from me. 


	16. Malocchio—Setup (3 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has done absolutely nothing to earn the Stink Eye from Doctor Motorcycle Boy Mc-World Saver. Not. A. Thing. And yet, if he weren’t holding two coffees, he’d be checking to see if his hair and eyebrows have ignited under the sheer force of the Stink Eye he has just very definitely gotten from the man. 

> _“Just—how do you even compete with that?”  
>  — Kate Beckett, Setup (3 x16)_

* * *

He has done absolutely nothing to earn the Stink Eye from Doctor Motorcycle Boy Mc-World Saver. Not. A. Thing. And yet, if he weren’t holding two coffees, he’d be checking to see if his hair and eyebrows have ignited under the sheer force of the Stink Eye he has just very definitely gotten from the man. 

He’s not sure how he _could_ have done anything to earn it. He’s met the guy exactly once—twice now, he supposes, if Assault With a Deadly Stink Eye counts—and _he_ wasn’t the one engaging in smug _Kate Hasn’t Told You About Me, Has She?_ innuendo.

And anyway, this is a workplace. It’s where they—he and Beckett—work _together_. It is not a _Frankly Condescending Kiss on the Top of the Head_ place, so if synesthesiac insults are in order, it’s _his_ eye that should be doing the stinking. 

He shouldn’t ask her about it. He can see from a mile away that she is not in any mood. He should, in fact, see if bomb disposal has some kind of very long, mechanized arm with one of those cool _Lost in Space_ robot claws that he could borrow to drop off her coffee from minimum safe distance. But he’s affronted (because he’s done absolutely nothing to warrant the stink eye) and intrigued (because it’s possible that Doctor Motorcycle Boy was paying the stink eye forward). 

He zips his lip about it after his initial query wins him quite the verbal smack upside the head, but he can’t seem to let it go. Like, really, what could he possibly have done to get on the bad side of a man he doesn’t know at all? 

He thinks sourly of his adventure with Beckett in the forgotten sewer tunnels beneath the Old Haunt. He remembers the Stink Eye from her (no one, least of all he, ever has or ever will forget being on the receiving end of a Beckett Stink Eye) at being summoned from her sleepover research date. He considers and rejects the incident as a Stink Eye contributing factor. 

She might have been annoyed at his late night hunch—she _was_ annoyed—but she came because she’s a cop who can’t rest until she closes the case. Josh has to know that. He has to have accepted it, or he wouldn’t still be around. And he does still seem, unfortunately, to be around. 

He thinks next of the fact that he’s been to her place twice in very recent memory, having never been there before recent memory. He does a reflexive, slightly guilty review of traces of himself that he might have left there—the flowers, the guest list for the prospective scholarship fundraiser—then his spine stiffens.

He spends a brief moment puffed up with defiance. Why _shouldn’t_ he go to her place when he has good reason to? Why, given that they are friends, colleagues, partners, shouldn’t he brighten her new place with a bouquet if the spirit moves him, and why shouldn’t he do something generous and kind to honor her mother? 

But defiance and rhetorical questions are a short-lived mood, too. He thinks about the set of shutters and the murder board behind them, the one Doctor Sleepover Research Assistant doesn’t know about. He has a see-saw moment of regret that she bears that weight overwhelmingly alone, and hope mixed with a soupçon of smugness that it’s _him_ she shares the burden with—albeit not nearly as often or as fully as he’d like her to—and not Doctor Stink Eye, Motorcycle Boy. 

When the see-saw levels out, he finds himself in the midst of an oddball reversal. He does a mental review of the neat interior of her place. His near-eidetic memory offers up the one-of-everything tableau in the dish drainer and the fact that the flowers he’d brought still had pride of place. 

He pictures magazines in the rack and a few within easy reach of the couch on the coffee-table-slash ottoman. There is no his-and-hers vibe there, other than—score!—the one he’d passed along once he was finished, because there’s a story in it that he knows she’ll love. He recalls his almost, but not quite, entirely unnecessary trip to the bathroom and the iron will it took to resist going through her medicine cabinet. He recalls one and only one toothbrush in the cup on the edge of the sink and one and only one towel on the rack.

Pieced together it’s a portrait of absence. He can call to mind not a single hint that Josh exists, so far as his presence in her apartment goes. 

And doesn’t that just cast the Stink Eye in an entirely new light? 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Josh’s insecurity is very nearly a thing. (But still not a thing)


	17. Innervation—Countdown (3 x 17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It says something not great about her, she thinks, that she is focused on lasts. On a day when she and he saved the world—or New York, which is the part of the world that matters—all she can seem to think of is what if they hadn’t? If the bomb had gone off, if no one had pulled them out of that freezer, Martha and Alexis hadn’t, if Josh hadn’t. If, if, if … 

> _“What kind of link?”  
>  — Agent Mark Fallon, Countdown (3 x 17)_

* * *

It says something not great about her, she thinks, that she is focused on lasts. On a day when she and he saved the world—or New York, which is the part of the world that matters—all she can seem to think of is what if they hadn’t? If the bomb had gone off, if no one had pulled them out of that freezer, Martha and Alexis hadn’t, if Josh hadn’t. _If, if, if …_

Her head is full of ifs, and every one leaves her with a different _last_ to consider. And her mind seems hell bent on considering every single one before the sun rises over New York again. 

They’re not exactly morbid wonderings, her mind’s urgent collection. Or not all them are, anyway. In a dark compartment of her mind, one of the _if_ s—one of the _last_ s—has to do with the rising pitch of Fallon’s voice as he cried out, _I’m sorry_ on endless repeat. In a dark compartment of her mind, she wonders how close that moment brought him to his wife’s death, to the last moment of that last phone call. 

That _last_ is the first to come to her in the middle of the night. She awakes, shivering, and inches her way out of bed with Josh settled and breathing evenly. She pads as softly as she can to the bathroom, to where her thickest robe hangs. She Pink Panther tiptoes down the hall to the couch and scares every blanket she can find plus a wool coat or two. She piles everything high and tugs them, one by one, up to her chin and waits for the chill to subside. She waits for her heartbeat to slow and that raises a different kind of chill. It takes her to the _last_ in the freezer. 

She is still piecing that together. Her memories of everything from the moment they started taking fire in the warehouse to waking in the back of the ambulance come to her out of order, untrustworthy, and with stark, upsetting force. She thinks she sees Jamal alive there with an incongruous glass of water. She sees the white expanse of the projector screen and thinks to herself they should sail right out of there on the rolling waves of condensation. She turns her face into the couch cushions and wills herself not to see any of it, real or unreal or anywhere in between. 

It works, but what fills the void is more terrifying. She _feels_ instead. She doesn’t shiver—that’s not what the cold was like at its worst. She aches. Her fingertips, her toes, the tips of her ears and the end of her nose burn with terrible fire. 

It hurts to breathe. It hurts for her heart to beat and she remembers, with perfect clarity, that particular _last—_ how she spent the precious little energy left in her body to lift her hand to his face, even though she couldn’t feel the point of contact, her skin on his. She remembers with perfect clarity making a choice to use the last breath in her body, the last thought her mind would form to tell him, to tell him, to tell him. _I just want you to know how much I …_

She lies there with it, curled into herself, curled on her side with her face still pressed to the couch cushions. _I just want you to know …_ It tries to stop her heart. It tries to stop the blood in her veins and steal the breath from her lungs. It’s a _last_ so terrifying that her mind moves on to the second time she almost died today, the second _last_ her mind insists on facing in the middle of the damned night. 

Their argument in the car clangs around inside her head, hard enough that she has to laugh. She has to press her blanket-wrapped knuckles to her temples to try to stop the reverberations. She feels the accelerator of her unmarked beneath the ball of her foot, its stiff spring fighting her as she tried to coax more speed out of it. She feels the wheel trying to jerk free of her iron grip and finding itself no match. She hears the crackle of the radio blasting out the message from the chopper overhead— _black van, Broadway, seventy-second._ She remembers sliding her eyes to his side of the car for her last-ever _I told you so_ glare and thinking she’d better make it a good one. 

It’s harrowing, all of it, but a grin spreads across her face. A feeling, a moment, perfectly recalled rises in her to trace silver, tingling sparks through her veins as her attention fixes on the last _last_ , staring down the menacing red timer. Her attention fixes on the literal big-bomb-clock end of the world and it’s all there—the sensation of her heart hammering against her ribs, her blood galloping in her veins, her breath a ragged thing. It’s all there, but it’s background, this time. 

It’s incidental music or stage business or something, and the main event is the way he takes her hand. There are literal seconds left in the world—for them and for so many they love and don’t love—and he takes as many of them as he can to wrap his hand tight around hers, to look at her straight on. _I just want you to know how much I …_

She hates that she was wearing gloves. She hates that her fingers were too frozen to enjoy the feel of stubble friction tugging at the loops and whorls of her fingerprints. She hates that in their last moments they each sought the other’s skin and circumstance denied them. 

She hates it. It’s the thought she sails on off to sleep. It’s almost the thought, but there’s a grin and a tingling trace of silver sparks through her veins, and they whisper. 

_It wasn’t the last._

_It wasn’t._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Tired. Behind. Brain dead. This is all I got. Not a thing. 


	18. Bodhi Tree—One Life to Lose (3 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has really been trying to entertain a more enlightened attitude toward Doctor Motorcycle Boy. For one thing, he only ever calls him Doctor Motorcycle Boy in the privacy of his own head anymore. For another, he has cut way back on writing gruesome death scenes for thinly veiled stand-ins for him in the current Nikki Heat book that he’s way behind on—quite possibly because he’s spending a lot of time writing gruesome death scenes for thinly veiled stand-ins for Doctor Motorcycle Boy. But seriously, he really has been trying. 

> _“Now does that look ordinary to you?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, One Life to Lose (3 x 18(_

* * *

He has really been trying to entertain a more enlightened attitude toward Doctor Motorcycle Boy. For one thing, he only ever calls him Doctor Motorcycle Boy in the privacy of his own head anymore. For another, he has cut way back on writing gruesome death scenes for thinly veiled stand-ins for him in the current Nikki Heat book that he’s way behind on—quite possibly because he’s spending a lot of time writing gruesome death scenes for thinly veiled stand-ins for Doctor Motorcycle Boy. But seriously, he really has been trying. 

It’s a little silly, he thinks. Enlightenment is a pretty internal process, give that he’s been a very good boy indeed in terms of what he says out loud about the guy. This amounts to almost nothing since their sudden, wildly frank chat about him in the privacy of an Emergency Services isolation tent, but nothing, he thinks, earns him some brownie points, because he’s staying out of the way. He’s respecting the fact that she is invested in figuring things out. 

So he’s nailing the art of saying nothing, and now, he supposes, it’s time to work on not resenting the hell out of the fact that she’s invested in figuring things out with a guy who is not him. It’s time to work on enlightenment, because he really does care about her so much. The word sounds so inadequate in his head, and yet it’s true. He pines for her, desires her, adores, _wants_ her—but he _cares_ for her, too. He wants her to be happy, and that’s not nearly as simple as it sounds. He wants to _want_ her happiness, regardless of where she finds it. So he works on enlightenment. 

It’s no mean feat on any given day. It is a Herculean effort in the wake of their trip to _Temptation Lane_. He leaves her to it, as promised. He’s off with a smile that hardly emphasizes his clenched jaw and gritted teeth at all. He meets the boys for a beer and he is not, not, _not_ contemplating the idea that Doctor Motorcycle Boy could be a super villain. 

Except, of course, Doctor Motorcycle Boy _could_ be a super villain. He could be quote–unquote _saving_ surgical patients and turning them into his zombie army. He could be outfitting them with extra-robust hearts and training them up as super soldiers for the inevitable overthrow New York’s municipal government. 

Or his villainy could be more mundane than that. He thinks about his face filling the screen of her phone—his bland, expressionless, geometry-book exercise face—and decides that Doctor Motorcycle Boy is obviously a run-of-the-mill villain. He’d like him to be a serial sexual harasser who always gets away with it—except he wouldn’t like that at all, because it’s more terrible than a zombie army or the fall of New York to cardiac super soldiers. 

He could be a direct-from-factory lecherous doctor, except that’s terrible, too. He is a man on the path to enlightenment, and even Doctor Motorcycle Boy’s evil twin should not be bed hopping on her. 

He _could_ have a terrible goatee, though. He could grow a terrible, evil twin goatee and decide that, like Kung Fu, he has to wander the earth to find himself. Except Doctor Motorcycle Boy leaving to wander the earth—terrible goatee or no—would make her sad, and he’s too far along the stupid path to enlightenment to grin to himself and insist that he’d happily comfort her in her sorrow. 

He could have a terrible accident that leaves him scarred and withdrawn, but that runs into the same sadness problems. Plus, he doesn’t know where she comes down on _Phantom of the Opera/Beauty and the Beast_ tropes—that might stoke her bad boy–leaning fire, 

Doctor Motorcycle Boy could be a clone. He could be secretly dying. He could fall off a cliff or fall into a convenient coma. He could turn out to be the next in line for the throne of a tiny fictional country for which he must department immediately to rule. 

Doctor Motorcycle Boy could be written off without a word like one of those characters that goes up into the attic to wax his skis and is never spoken of again. Doctor Motorcycle Boy could simply catch a case of nobility, realizing that she is in love with her dashing partner, though she is afraid to risk her heart. Doctor Motorcycle Boy could tell her, seriously and sweetly with their love theme playing low in a minor key, that hearts are meant for risking. 

Doctor Motorcycle Boy could just pack the hell up and leave town. The possibilities are endless. And not one moves him closer to enlightenment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: So braindead; enlightenment—absence of things.


	19. Inclusive—Law and Murder (3 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re going to make me regret this, aren’t you?” They haven’t even reached the corner outside the precinct before she has to ask the first time. It’s obvious it won’t be the last. 

> _“What, y'all trying for the deadly double?”_   
>  _— Wardell Williams, Law and Murder (3 x 19)_

* * *

“You’re going to make me regret this, aren’t you?” They haven’t even reached the corner outside the precinct before she has to ask the first time. It’s obvious it won’t be the last. 

He’d listened patiently—or at least with what passes for patience with him—in the elevator on the way down from the fourth floor while she’d given him the bullet points, no spoilers run down of the plot to _Forbidden Planet_. He had listened with attention, waited a beat to be sure she was finished, then launched into his campaign for what he’s calling _Both/And_ OR _Snacks Are Not Meals._

“I’m just trying to make it clear that I’m not married to the idea of burgers.” This thought is entirely continuous with whatever thought he started out with back on the precinct steps. It’s as though she has not spoken at all. “For one thing, New Jersey is the only state in the northeast in which it is legal to marry one’s burger.” He gives her a sidelong glance to see if she’s laughing. She is not laughing, but only through sheer force of will. “But I also want to make it clear that I am open to all reasonable suggestions for our late-night, post-movie dinner.” 

“Oh, it’s all _reasonable_ suggestions now?” She tips her chin up as though she’s appealing to the mild spring night in the case she’s building against him. But she’s not building a case. She’s not wondering if she regrets this already. She’s hiding a smile. “Moments ago—mere _moments_ , Castle—you were generously allowing me carte blanche to choose the setting for this mythical meal.” 

“Suppose we stipulate carte mostly blanche.” He bounds a few steps ahead so he can face her as he walks—no, practically _skips_ —backward. “Then will you say yes?” 

She almost does say yes. It’s nearly a reflex, and that’s a little unnerving. He’s working the puppy dog eyes and it gets to her—almost gets to her—and she wonders when that happened. She probably shouldn’t wonder too long or hard though. She suspects the answer is not exactly going to be reassuring. 

“Either/or,” she says sternly. She reaches out to grab his sleeve so he doesn’t actually back directly into the path of an oncoming cab. 

He startles and scurries to fall in step beside her again. “ Unfair! That is totally un—“ His head swings toward her, his eyes narrowed. “Wait. _Either_ snacks _or_ dinner after. Because you already said I could have popcorn _and_ candy.” 

“Did I?” She scrunches up her face like she certainly can’t recall agreeing to something patently ridiculous. 

It gets the job done. He panics a little and has to spend the rest of the short walk to the Angelika working his way back up to candy _and_ popcorn. He has to lobby hard for real butter, not the fake-butter flavoring. 

“We never talked about any kind of toppings at all, Castle,” she cuts into his impassioned argument against the clothes-staining, nature-defying, crime against god and man that fake butter is, “so I’m not sure where this conversation is going.” 

He is delightfully vexed by the whole thing, then suitably chastened and humbly grateful when she honors not only the original popcorn and candy deal, but springs for extra butter— _real_ butter. She figures it’s a job well done as far as diverting that conversation stream goes. He is immediately sucked into the movie—which he has obviously seen a hundred times before, not that she was deluding herself otherwise—and she figures that he’ll have forgotten all about his _Both/And_ campaign by the time it lets out. 

But it seems that the night is still young as far as delusions on her part go. He starts back in on the vast number of late-night dinner options available to New Yorkers in between effusive sentence fragments about which parts of the movie are definitely the best, accept no substitutes. 

“We could do tacos. Couldn’t you go for a taco?” He does not wait to see if she could, in fact, got for a taco. “Oh! And how _scary_ is that whole dying line?” He makes his voice gravely. “Monsters from the id.” His mind pings back in the direction of food. “Tacos, though. I’m seriously thinking …” He finally seems to register that the conversation has gone one sided. “Not … tacos?” 

“Castle, I never said …” It’s her turn to trail off when his face falls. She sighs. “Are you really still hungry?” She scours a hand over her eyes. “How could you possibly still be hungry?” 

“Nah,” he says quickly. “It’s … nah.” 

It’s like watching a defensive barrier snick up round him. It’s not what she wanted. It’s not what she meant. “Castle—“ 

“I’m not, really.” He softens. He gives her a crooked smile. It’s a mask that slips. “Just … didn’t want the night to end.” There’s a tug from him to her. A jolt that makes her heart thump hard. “I had fun.” 

“Me too,” she says quietly, and that seems to be good night. He gives her another smile and turns to follow his separate path. She calls after him, though. Some fool instinct makes her call after him. “Rain check on those tacos?” 

He turns to face her. He walks backward for a few skipping steps. “Rain check.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: No meal. No things. So brain dead.


	20. Joint Venture—A Slice of Death (3 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s later than he thought by the time he makes it out of the precinct. Monica Wyatt is still keeping mum. Monica Wyatt, expensive lawyer or no, is spending at least the night in lock up, as all available judges are suddenly unavailable for impromptu bail hearings. 

> _“Things like abusing police resources for your own personal agenda?”  
>  — Kate Beckett, A Slice of Death (3 x 20)_

* * *

It’s later than he thought by the time he makes it out of the precinct. Monica Wyatt is still keeping mum. Monica Wyatt, expensive lawyer or no, is spending at least the night in lock up, as all available judges are suddenly unavailable for impromptu bail hearings. 

Getting to the point of stalemate with their semi-mythical drug queen pin apparently has taken more time than he realized. He doesn’t quite believe his watch. He moves further into the grungy orange pool of the streetlight and squints at its treacherous face. The stubborn tick retorts with the memory of Monica Wyatt sounding annoyed—sounding high and mighty about how long she’d had to wait—and unfortunately the math checks out. 

“Damn,” he curses softly. He taps his phone against his thigh and twists to look up the street and down. He looks for a cab. He lifts the phone and ponders the possibility of calling a car service. One involves hunting, the other waiting. For each option, he does the math left to right and sideways, but he can’t seem to make it work out the way he really wants it to. “Damn,” he says again.

“Cursing the darkness, Castle?” She appears in the grungy orange pool of light and transforms it. She transforms the whole scene into something with sharp angles, slick silver shadows, and it’s her. It’s the perfect lines of her body and the soft waves of her hair. It’s not just that he’s got noir on his mind. 

“Poor planing.” He gives her a rueful smile and holds up the phone. There’s a webpage open on it with treacherous business hours blinking in bold font. “I’m cursing my poor planning.” 

She steps up next to him to peer at the page. “Pizza?” She wrinkles her nose. “You can face pizza right now?” 

“Pizza is eternal.” He looks at her in mock horror. “A New Yorker must always stand ready to fold a slice.” She laughs and rolls her eyes. He, in turn, sobers as he catches sight of the address, and the treacherous business hours blink. His thumb finds the the button and the phone’s screen darkens. “But this … it’s Alexis’s favorite.”

“Things that bad with her new nemesis?” she asks with a sympathetic wince. 

“There have been shenanigans and fisticuffs.” He has to tamp down a grin and keep himself from sharing—proudly—the fact that his kid kicked her ex-friend’s ass, when said ex-friend made the mistake of coming for her. He’s not sure Detective Law and Order will see pride as the right parental reaction. “I was thinking she could use a treat.” 

“Pizza is the New Yorker’s treat of choice,” she agrees with a nod. “Let the healing begin.” 

“The Healing will have to wait till tomorrow at least.” He casts another frustrated glance down at his watch. “Closing time looms. I’ll never get cab to take me all the way out there. And by the time a car service gets here …” 

She has stopped listening. She sticks her hand in her coat pockets and flips the keys to her unmarked from one palm into the other. “Come on.” 

She’s already five long strides ahead of him. He loses another two blinking after her. “It’s all the way …” The trot he has to break into to keep up with her chops his sentences into irregular bits. “Beckett, you don’t have to. It’s _far_!” He barks at last and stands his ground. 

She pivots to face him, never breaking stride. “It’s New York. Nothing’s _that_ far.” 

“I wasn’t hinting.” He calls across the space between them. He’s eager to take her up on the offer—eager to spend time with her—and wary that he’s clinging or taking advantage or something nebulously problematic. He spends a lot of time wary lately, worried all the time that he’s crossing some kind of line. “It’s nice of you to offer, but it’s late, and the last thing you need is to be hauling all over creation—“ 

“You didn’t hint.” She shrugs. Her head tips to the side, clearly surprised that he’s resisting—clearly curious about it, and maybe a little hurt. “I offered.” She studies him and he’s convinced she can see that he’s suddenly bashful. He feels vulnerable and strangely like an old dad—a nostalgic dad she’s taking pity on in his helplessness. “Consider it an NYPD outreach. Preventive measures to discourage further juvenile delinquency.” 

He has to laugh when she puts it like that. He has to give in and take the gesture at face value. “Pizza can do that?” he asks, closing the gap between them. 

“New York pizza,” she tosses her keys high into the air and catches them again as they fall into step, “can do anything.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: A disjointed, hand-tossed, not!thing. 


	21. Duck Soup—The Dead Pool (3 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is made of soft spots. She catches herself in the thought—which can only be described as fond—as she watches him making what he seems to think are a serious of surreptitious phone calls. They are not surreptitious phone calls. They are not even discreet phone calls, mostly because after he finishes each and every one, he bounces in place, looking both pleased with himself and anxious at the same time. 

> _“It’s what we do for them, right?”_   
>  _— Lorraine Dinovi, The Dead Pool (3 x 21)_

* * *

He is made of soft spots. She catches herself in the thought—which can only be described as _fond_ —as she watches him making what he seems to think are a serious of surreptitious phone calls. They are not surreptitious phone calls. They are not even _discreet_ phone calls, mostly because after he finishes each and every one, he bounces in place, looking both pleased with himself and anxious at the same time. 

She keeps an eye on the scene as she halfheartedly plugs away at her paperwork. She doesn’t know exactly what he’s up to, though she’s fairly certain whatever it is, it has to do with some soft spot–related grand gesture he’s in the process of making. She wonders idly if it has to do with Alex Conrad, some out-of-proportion kindness he’s plotting to make up for his brief foray into the dark side. Whatever it is, his antics and the eye roll–inducing swell of fond feeling they inspire, are a welcome distraction. 

She’s glad enough—or as glad as she ever is, anyway, that they have Rob Treadwyck in custody, but there are too many unfortunate threads to this one for it to feel much like a win—Zack Lindsey cut down before he could make his mark, Brian Morris, Coach Rome, Doctor Calabro all slinking away, relatively unscathed. 

There’s Bridget McManus, who’s had her tough-as-nails heart broken twice over, once by Rob Treadwyck the “Mentor” and once by Rob Treadwyck. There’s Lorraine Dinovi, who will never be the same, and a bar full of neighborhood hopefuls who’ll shake their heads and tell the scuffed bar top that Bensonhurst kids never catch a break, never have, never will. 

So she plugs away at the paperwork with her cheek propped on her palm. She flicks her gaze up and over, following his progress from just outside the break room to the elevators and back again as he finishes what seems to be the final in a series of calls that should probably win some kind of award for least clandestine communications that were meant to be clandestine. 

She turns her attention fully and ostentatiously back to the interview notes she was supposed to be going over for inclusion in her report of the DA. She readies herself for his bounding, good-puppy energy and prepares to deploy her best _I’m-working-here-Castle_ glare the minute he throws himself into his chair. 

But she has to put the safety back on the glare. She has to drop her pen and sit up straight, craning to see what he’s doing, because he doesn’t head for his chair at all. He heads for the Captain’s office. He bursts through the door with hardly a cursory knock, and the knucklehead closes it behind himself so she can’t even eavesdrop on what is obviously an intense conversation. 

The Captain’s face and body language are totally unreadable after the initial blank, incredulous look at having his sanctum sanctorum so unceremoniously entered. He sits behind his desk, hands folded before him, hardly interrupting Castle’s animated monologue. 

She’s on the verge of inventing an errand that will take her past the office door. She’d really like to barge right through it with something that urgently needs signing, but that would be infringing on Castle’s least-on-the-down-low attempts at keeping things on the down-low territory, so she sits and stews. She tries to imagine what on earth he’s been up to that would have the Captain’s head dipping for a moment in something like relief before he stands and comes around the desk to shake Castle’s hand and shoo him out of the office, almost in the same motion. 

It happens quickly—the wrap up of whatever it is the two of them were talking about. She’s caught metaphorically flat footed. It’s obvious that she wasn’t doing the paperwork she was supposed to be embroiled in. It’s obvious that she was trying to listen in. She prepares to deny it anyway.

She writes furiously on the page in front of her—nonsense that means she’ll have to do the whole damned thing over. She waits for him to slide smugly into his chair now. She waits for him to withhold and withhold until she kicks his shins and twists his ear and hangs him out the window by his pant legs until he confesses.

But he confesses right away, or almost right away. He spends a deer-in-headlights moment at the exact halfway point between the Captain’s office and his chair, then rushes toward her with stubborn-puppy energy. 

“I got Tommy Marcone a lawyer. An actual one. With real business cards and almost no ads on the sides of buses.” He lifts his chin defiantly, even as his shoulders hunch with guilt. “He’s a thief, I know. And a blackmailer. And an idiot.” He sneaks a look at her, for all the good it does him. Her face is blank with surprise. “I know he’s all that. But his best friend is dead and he’s never had a fair shot at anything and, I just …” He trails off. He spreads his hands, utterly at a loss. 

“You just.” She treats him to the glare that’s really a smile. He spine goes soft with relief. He settles into his chair. “You’re just a softie, Castle.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Puppy metaphors. Not a thing. 


	22. Hazard—To Love and Die in LA (3 x 22)

> _“Help Beckett put this thing to bed, all right?”_   
>  _— Roy Montgomery, To Love and Die in L. A. (3 x 22)_

* * *

Cosmic irony is his least favorite flavor of one of his favorite literary devices, at least when it’s him the cosmos are messing with. And currently, he is most definitely the plaything of the cosmos. 

He finds himself, most unexpectedly, on an adventure with Kate Beckett. He is behind the wheel of a Ferrari with the top down on the sun-drenched, palm-lined trees of the left coast. She is leaning back against the leather seats, pretending that she hates the Ferrari. (She does not hate the Ferrari.) She has produced, from somewhere, the darkest of dark glasses. They give her a mysterious air and up her bad-ass quotient by quite a lot. It’s the two of them against the world. They are on an adventure. 

It’s everything the Richard Castle of seven hundred and some odd days ago could have dreamed of when he button-holed Esposito and browbeat him into pulling her mother’s file, the Richard Castle who plied Doctor Death with mid-day scotch and flattery to get him to paw through the defining tragedy of her life so he could have an adventure. It’s everything the Richard Castle of just a few months later tried to convince her was written in the stars, because he couldn’t just apologize, he couldn’t just respect her choices because he wanted a fucking adventure. 

He examines all that. He sees his own sordid past and the experiences—the tragedies heaped upon tragedies—that have shaped him and brought him to this moment. He sees Coonan, Raglan, Lockwood or whoever it is she sits across the table from once a week out at Riker’s. 

He comes to the painful realization that he’s on an adventure with Kate Beckett, and it’s not at all what Richard Castle, seven hundred and some odd days on has dreamed of for a while. 

It’s not that he doesn’t still adore her ferocity and burning drive. It’s not that he doesn’t want to see Royce’s killer rot for so many reasons. It’s just that he has other priorities now. He sees sees the possibility of adventure in the truth-telling light of a cosmic joke. 

He sees now the tears she will not shed. He sees what they do to her breath, the stilted, painful rise and fall of her ribs as she grits hers teeth and swallows down her grief by sheer force of will. The weight of Royce’s death—the weight of another body of another person she loved left in heap in a filthy alley—is an almost physical thing pressing down on her shoulders, curling her spine in a most unnatural way. 

She is suffering. He doesn’t know how the him of seven hundred and some odd days ago could have failed to understand how much _suffering_ would go into the fulfillment of his adolescent fantasy. He was going to being the whiz kid who solved her mother’s murder, and they were going to have an adventure along the way. He doesn’t know how he could have failed to grasp how much of her suffering is the fuel that drives the engine of this adventure already in progress. 

He can’t deny that he’s enjoying it. He can’t deny so much of this makes his heart race—the sunglasses and the wind in her hair, the lock picks and her cinematic defiance of Montgomery, of Seeger, of God and everyone in pursuit of justice, of redemption. He gets swept up in it, moment to moment. He’s giddy, moment to moment, with the realization that he has her all to himself, three thousand miles from everything. 

But beneath, beyond, and in between every one of those moments, he aches for her. He worries and wonders how he can coax her back from the ledge she’s determined to rush out on to. He wonders if his much-lauded facility with words can be of any fucking help in this situation. He suspects it cannot. 

He wonders anyway what she would do if he simply took her in his arms and whispered against her wind-blown hair a solemn promise that she does not have to do this—that Royce would have hated the idea of her suffering like this, jeopardizing her career, and putting herself in the path of men like the one who gunned him down in an alley. He would give up this and every future promise of adventure if he could do that for her. 

If a representative from the cosmos were to show up and cackle about the irony of it all, then demand that he make a choice, he would, in a heartbeat, give up the Ferrari, the sunglasses, and glitzy room. He would hand over the lock picks and patiently weather another seven hundred and something odd days with Ryan and Esposito popping up and dropping in at the most inopportune moments. 

He would gladly swap the fun of everything being the two of them against the world for a city full of people who are eager to love her, support her, and comfort her through the senseless losses life keeps tossing her way. He would give up all of this, If it could keep her form getting herself hurt. 

He would give up the adventure. He would take her home and sit quietly with her if it could bring her any kind of peace at all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Canoodling it out—Not a Thing. 


	23. Perurable—Pretty Dead (3 x 23)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Castle. For the millionth time, you cannot just barge in and offer advice. Can. Not.” She underscores her un-contracted verb with two vicious hits on the stapler for all the good it’ll do her. “We all play along.” 

> _“How … badly did you want it?”  
>  — Richard Castle, Pretty Dead (3 x 23)_

* * *

“Castle. For the millionth time, you cannot just barge in and offer advice. Can. Not.” She underscores her un-contracted verb with two vicious hits on the stapler for all the good it’ll do her. “We all play along.” 

“I’m not offering advice,” he counters. He twists in his chair to study Montgomery, who is pacing the perimeter of his office as though he’s making decisions about what to start dismantling now. “Not yet. I need more intel. For example, is Evelyn traditional, which would be pearls, or modern? Because that’s diamonds. See? That makes a big difference.” 

“No,” she says in slow, loud English. “It doesn’t because as far as you are concerned, the Captain is actually retiring.” 

“This is very unlike you, you know?” He shifts his attention from the Captain to her. He sizes her up, and appears to find her wanting. “This commitment to a complete farce?” 

“And you?” She casually hefts the stapler, making eye contact with him as she tests its weight and potential utility as a projectile. “Shouldn’t you be completely on board with farce?

“There’s a time and a place for farce,” he sniffs as he tries to look as if he is _not_ preparing to dodge a stapler. “This is serious. If he isn’t going to give her the gift he _said_ he was going to give her, he needs a back-up gift. That much I know.” 

“Evelyn plays along, too,” she tells him curtly as she snatches things out of her three-tier plastic tray in search of more things that need staples pounded into them. She is in a very pound-staples-into-things mood, possibly because she’s been trapped in this circular conversation with him for days. “The Captain takes home a little box of things. There’s a case and he can’t retire. The little box of things comes back.” 

“And—boom—the box with the back-up present comes out.” He kicks back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. “The perfect, research-driven back-up present. Which I will advise upon once I get the intel I need.” 

And with that emphatic push of the reset button, her head begins to throb, temple to temple. She rolls open a desk drawer and tosses the stapler inside. It’s far too tempting a weapon right now. In fact, her desk is filled with potential weapons, and that pretty much signals that it’s quitting time. 

“Come on.” She hauls herself to her feet. She yanks open the desk’s deep bottom drawer and retrieves her shoulder bag. “Time to knock off for the day.” She reaches down and grabs a fistful of his sport coat. 

“But he looks—“ He ducks neatly under her arm, thwarting her most reliable, rapid-fire ear tweak. “He looks like he could be wrapping up. I just need three minutes.” He thinks about it. He glances at his watch and grimaces at the rapid sweep of the second hand. “Eleven minutes tops.” 

“We’re going.” She strikes out for the elevator, forcing him into a choice between following or losing a sleeve—and possibly the integrity of his shoulder joint. “You are not interviewing, surveying, or pawing through the Captain’s trash in the name of research. You are not, in fact, allowed in the bullpen unsupervised until you are over this.” 

“Well, Detective.” He puts on a sultry voice and waggles his eyebrows, even as he holds out a gallant arm to gesture her through the elevator doors first. “I hope you’re committed to your supervisory role.” 

She closes her eyes and knocks her head against the back wall of the elevator. She’s smiling. She’s still thinking about going back for the stapler, because she’d like to be prepared for the inevitable moment when she needs to throw it at him, but she’s smiling, too. 

“Why do you care, Castle?” she asks, almost surprised by her own serious tone. “Why the fixation on the Captain’s anniversary present?” 

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” He downshifts from antic mode to as serious as she sounds. “ _Thirty_ years, and what she still wants most is more Roy.” 

“It is,” she agrees quietly. 

_Thirty years._ It’s amazing and it’s daunting. She almost literally can’t imagine it. She opens her eyes to find his gaze locked on hers. The atmosphere in the elevator feels suddenly alive, like it’s all dangerous static shocks. There’s a time and place for farce, but this is serious. It’s personal and yearning. 

“Pearls.” Her voice is steady. Her gaze does not waver, even though her knees are quaking and her heart is pounding hard at the thought of it— _thirty years—_ but she sees it stretching out before her. “Traditional.” 

“Pearls,” he echoes. He sees it stretching out before him, too _. “_ Pearls it is.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Future pearls are not a thing. the Future is not a thing. Also, never forget: Phil – Lem == Murder. 


	24. Eurydice—Knockout (3 x 24)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thinks cinematically—or maybe theatrically is closer to the truth, given his pedigree. This was true before her. It seems true in the distant memories he has of Before Her. She crowds all else to the margins—to the wings, to follow his metaphor—but he dimly recalls thinking this way from early on, in stage directions and lighting cues, in bit players and main cast. 

> _“_ _Did you not understand the conditions of the agreement?”  
> _ _— Hal Lockwood, Knockout (3 x 24)_

* * *

He thinks cinematically—or maybe theatrically is closer to the truth, given his pedigree. This was true before her. It seems true in the distant memories he has of _Before Her_. She crowds all else to the margins—to the wings, to follow his metaphor—but he dimly recalls thinking this way from early on, in stage directions and lighting cues, in bit players and main cast. 

This peculiarity of mind is a mercy when the doorbell buzzes. It renders the moment legible to him—his daughter, exits downstage, a new character appears, and we see the man, older and careworn, will play a small but vital role. _Kate’s father_. 

There’s the necessary comedic beat on two sides of a threshold. There is the long moment in which our hero stands there gawping, reviewing in his mind all possible exits, staring. There is the same long moment in which the dry-witted supporting player waits him out. This lasts for a count of twelve—not eleven, not thirteen—and the tension breaks. _Sir. Yes. Jim, right? Sir. Come in. Please. If you would like._ Twelve monosyllables, one for each comedic pulse. 

There is the stage business of coffee. It follows hard on the silent agony the audience sees on our hero’s face as he comes within one breath—one sharply bitten tongue—of offering wine, beer, hard alcohol by names general and specific. But in the end, there is the salvation of stage business coffee. 

The hero crosses upstage to join the supporting player—the father—near what seems to be the the sole point of light in this universe, a table top lamp, softly shaded and touching each man’s face with incongruous autumn gold. The dialogue that follows is banal on the surface—it is the small talk of strangers jostled unexpectedly together, party goers stranded without benefit of finger sandwiches. But the audience sees easily beneath the surface: In the caged-bird flutter of the hero’s hands, they see he is eager to know more of her. He is eager to be known by this man—her father. He is eager for countless things, every one of which orbits around her. 

The father, in turn, is dryly amused, He sips his coffee and doles out his answers in tantalizing increments. He understands this planetary arrangement, these gravitational forces, inevitable and eternal. He understands them far better than the hero does, not as well as the hero will. 

The dialogue proceeds, a spiral-armed galaxy that speaks of her. It reminds the audience that everything here speaks of her, players and pauses, lights and curtain drops, the faces of two men, touched with incongruous autumn gold. 

The scene is the hero’s call to action. It is the divine charge laid on him by the benevolent and broken. It is a solemn, unexpected, and daunting task. The hero’s head bends under the weight of it. 

The sole point of light in this universe extinguishes. The scene ends. Fade to black. 

* * *

He thinks cinematically—or maybe theatrically. Maybe epically. This is irrelevant, in context. It’s no blessing or anything else. Any fool with any kind of mind can see the cycle inscribed and where he falls: He is a hero, refusing he call. 

His task is impossible. The audience knows this, though there is no antic soliloquy. His duty is clear, his flaws are countless and fatal, his failure is inevitable. But failure is still far off as of yet. 

He refuses the call. He thumbs his nose at the prophecy. He draws a blanket around his shoulders and mingles with the men by their several campfires, hoping for deliverance—for someone to clap him on the shoulder and say he has done enough, that they will take up the burden from here, and they will succeed where he surely— _surely_ —would have failed. 

But there is silence, only. There is stage business and fists raised in the general direction of the gods. There is, eventually, and a tip of lamp light shining through paper, a false sun with its circumference described by condensation, sublimation, desperation.

There is a scene change, a chase from wing to wing with the blackness of the background all the same. The temporary light of a conjured sun that dims almost as soon as it appears. It is a call to stage business, nothing more. The men, all but he, exit, stage left. The hero lingers. He stands at right angles to the tableau already fixed in the mind of the audience with its upstage light, well shaded, seemingly the sole light in this universe.

This scene, in contrast, is all stochastic illumination. The overhead buzz of stark white pours in from nowhere, rendering his face gaunt with shadows, yet his hands, his body swim in and out of overlapping ovals of something kinder and not quite autumn gold from the several desk lamps. 

The scene, well lit, nonetheless suggests a skeleton with its slatted ribs of vinyl blinds. It suggests a hero swallowed whole, and a long-term stay in the belly of the beast is tempting. Stark white slashes across the hero’s face and the audience understands that it is tempting. He is, after all, the hero, refusing the call. 

He is the hero, trying and failing to jerry-rig his own god in the machine. He lingers, one-hundred and twenty degrees away from another character, well-known, a small, but vital role—her mentor. The dialogue here proceeds in shorthand born of long acquaintance, deep respect. The dialogue here is terse, intense, efficient. The mentor offers up ancient history, a blessing because he yearns to know her. A curse because it ushers in the second inevitable dictum. 

The mentor, benevolent and broken, lays the charge again, like a ghost pointing soundlessly from the ramparts, a ghost taking his closing bows on the last of a three-night engagement. 

The hero is the hero. The call has been refused—pointlessly refused. And scene. 

* * *

He thinks cinematically—maybe theatrically. Operatically in this case. The scale of this, in every sense, demands nothing less. 

There is a second call to action, literal this time. A one-sided phone call. _Sir. Yes. Yes._ There are monosyllables without benefit of the comedic beat. There are monosyllables, resigned and barely audible, though the audience surely knows their tenor. There is a journey accomplished off stage—a journey deep into this cavernous underworld, with its hulking metal beasts, blue–black lit and hair raising. 

The hero arrives, unbeknownst to anyone, _in medias res._ The hero, having refused the first call, the hero having failed, arrives, unbeknownst to anyone, to fail again. 

She is an upright column of black picked out of the blue. She is a sharp-featured face, an elegant pair of hands drawing the blue into her, gathering what light there is to wield as her weapon. She is, for a single instant, a head bowed, a spine bending under the weight of history revealed, disordered allusions to a terrible past by the man, the mentor, the villain, it seems, clothed entirely in shadow. 

These sins weave through the heavy black air to wind around her, to transform her. She shakes the weight of devastating realization from her shoulders. She is an upright column of black, demanding and implacable, terrifying and beautiful in the hair-raising, blue–black light. 

There should be chords striking for this, low brass, heavy and dissonant. There should be thundering, unrelenting percussion that slams into the metal bones of this place, that slams into every useless cell of his body. There should be urgent strings rising to a fevered pitch and melancholy winds crying out in between. 

But there is no such thing. The dialogue here is pointed, traditional. It is a confession in recitative where there should be a villain’s aria, fiery and defiant. Instead, there is only this—a confession in recitative, painfully extracted, painfully made, painfully witnessed. 

He thinks cinematically, theatrically, epically, operatically, but the five-act structure fails him here. This is neither complication nor climax, neither reversal or falling action. This is the hero, watching helplessly from the wings. This is the nightmare of lines unlearned, a role that is nothing but a blank, page after page. 

This Is the fourth wall tumbling as the man, the mentor, the villain invokes him—the hero, now a miserable, ill-equipped god in the machine, stumbling from from the wings. He pleads with her. His vocal line is all but lost in the rising chaos, beneath the hiss of gravel under tires. His vocal line is all but drowned out by her absolution ringing out above all. 

There is an urgent sweep of jaundiced light. There are his arms, banding around her, nothing like a spiral galaxy. There is a flight from the underworld. There is an arrival at the very threshold of life once again. An arrival, but no hero’s victory. 

She looks back. She looks ever back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N; This is late and hot garbage and certainly not a thing. I am so behind on everything and I will die behind on everything. 


End file.
